RightCart: Shopping carts for everyone
It seems like it’s getting easier and easier to make an equivalent of an online store. With services like Amazon Associates, MyPickList, Shopify, and BloggerKit, there’s almost no excuse for a blogger not to get in on promoting relevant items for sale, and profiting from it. Now, with the entry of RightCart, users can literally place a full service shopping cart and checkout on their site with a few lines of code.
Their screencast shows just how easy it is to setup the cart with a typical blogger account. There were only two instances of copy-and-pastes, and they’re off and running with a quick, inline, and full-featured shopping cart. The focus is on selling your own items, but, you can also sell other people’s items, which will incur a 1% commission charge to RightCart — not bad at all.
The big win with RightCart is that it allows users to buy items without leaving your page. The AJAX is slick, and visitors will barely even notice that they’ve used a 3rd party service to buy the item. That being said, there were some concerns about people making false RightCarts, and tricking visitors in giving up their credit card numbers to the wrong people. Since then, RightCart has made amends with the issue by using a unique codeword to verify that the cart is indeed served from RightCart. In the end, it really is up to the buyer to be aware of the risks.
Even though the interface for generating codes and searching for items is a bit clunky looking, RightCart has some pretty slick technology for sellers to make instant online stores. An interesting idea would be for them to take an AdWords approach (like BloggerKit) for people to sell relevant items on their blogs by automatically grabbing the items from the text context. Therefore, as soon as you create a new item for sale, it will automatically be shown on anyone’s relevant blog post. It would be like edgeio, except the listings proceed from the center out to the edge.
