Many professional web developers including myself use the Fortune3 shopping cart software to create online stores for our clients. Despite the fact that prices of broadband and web servers have dropped dramatically, the software can only be used in their web servers.

As some of our clients want to host in their own servers, we have been asking for the stand-alone version. I am constantly bringing to their attention the inconvenience of the hosting dependency and the recurrent monthly fees.

Although Fortune3 software popularity at Download.com, Zdnet, and Tucows.com goes beyond all other shopping carts, beware: Some of the carts can be installed in any web server.

Fortune3 says that it will not be possible to release a stand-alone version that will provide all the functionality of its actual database-driven shopping cart engine, because it is too complex and requires many resources. A stand-alone version should be a HTML code generator instead of a database-driven Ecommerce engine.

We must wait and see. Fortune3 never announces their upcoming releases, but they listen. Since they are constantly releasing new versions of their software, I wouldn't be surprised one of these days we’ll have it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Mark is the development director of CommerceTree, an E-Commerce development firm based in south Florida. Mark has a degree in computer sciences from FIU and 8 years of expertise in developing online stores for small and medium size companies.