More and more we have customers who want to create ecommerce flash website. Until now we had to refuse cause we find it outrageous to sell useless things. Here is the list of reasons we had:

1. Flash was not SEO friendly enough which is vital for ecommerce site.
2. There was no Flash CMS good enough to manage and update such websites.
3. The development of custom ecommerce flash cart was too expensive and had all glitches I’ve already mentioned.

Since recently things have changed a lot, in this article I just want to share some of my thoughts regarding flash shopping cart advantages and drawbacks. This part tells about SEO, CMS, general advantages of Flash Technology.

The main advantage of Flash technology drawing all extra attention and bringing Adobe tons of cash is the interactivity. Flash websites bring unique opportunity to “show out” and have an advantage over the competitors. Being innovative is really important for any business. This is what makes our clients look for new solutions for the online shops. Yes, old good OsCommerce has all required features except one really important. They do not impress the customer any more. So if you are looking for the solution that makes the customer say WOW! then professional and interactive flash shopping cart is just what you need.

One of the biggest problems Flash had was poor search engines optimization ability. Since the 1^st of July, 2008 Adobe states that swf files are searchable. This was really important step which will definitely change the web for good. In SWF Searchability FAQ you can read full text to find out why Adobe, Google and Yahoo work together now.  Also since the deep linking is now available for Flash, the developers can now play with the URLs and the titles. This means that due to implementation of SWFaddress 2.4 every single page in flash document now can have it’s own URL and document title(displayed in the top of the browser and very important for search engines).  All together these factors solve the issue of SE Optimization for ecommerce flash websites.

The problem of Flash CMS for e-commerce still exists. According to my casual observations none of the companies created full functional content management system for e-commerce flash solutions yet. To say the truth, many of flash developers are working in this direction, but the results are insignificant I would say.

Here is the list of the websites providing e-commerce flash templates, or sort of…

www.flashcart.com – boasts to provide full functional flash shopping cart with the support of Authorize.net and PayPal gateways and a full suite of tools required for online shop management. Unfortunately I was not able to find any of live examples or demos demonstration the cart, neither at the website nor on the Net.

www.myflashcart.com – according to the description the shopping cart is completely integrated with PayPal and can be customized to match the color scheme of your site.  No information/demo were provided  regarding the backend and integration with PayPal API.

www.flashmint.com – provides 2 types of e-commerce flash templates. The 1^st type of templates comes without the admin panel and the second one which is called CMSv3 has very limited ecommerce features and can be barely called shopping cart. In fact you can purchase only 1 item at a time. Both of the products support PayPal payment gateway.

www.flashden.net offers one more simple yet pretty customizable ecommerce solution, Of course it won’t work for big website but if you are running small business maybe it’s just what you are looking for. Just like other shopping cart this one has the support of PayPal and you can play with the colors. Unfortunately CMS is not included, though I would not even expect it for $17 bucks.

www.fancycms.com is one of the most promising Flash CMS solutions so far. These guys are developing impressive flex based admin panel with premium class flash front end, and which is more important their websites are equipped with ecommerce features right out of the box. According to the release notes the website comes with full functional shopping cart and the admin panel allowing to track sales. Once again the cart works with PayPal only…and as usual there is no delivery calculator which is a big disadvantage in comparison with oscommerce or zencart for example.

http://www.xmlflashcart.com is the last decent flash cart I was able to find. Just like FabcyCMS it provides all required features (like item size, color and other options), it has nice intuitive interface and works with PayPal.