New in v3 is also built-in help. For example, click on the little, yellow information icons on this page (this is a demo of v3, standard version).

http://www.earlyimpact.com/demos/standard/pcadmin/AdminSetti ngs.asp?ActiveTab=4

We are working on updating the User Guide, but we added too many new features to this thing, and so it's taking a while

I like to give you our time frame we had with an older version.  At that time we did not have an excel file.  We had one person adding about 1000 products by hand in the back end.  It took about one week to get the products into the system, that was only working 1/2 day on it.  The current and the new version lets you import the products, which should cut the time into half if you don't have an excel sheet on hand.  As for installation/setup we simply paid Early Impact to do it for us.  It was only 50 dollars back then and I think it well worse it.  We simply customized our header, footer, added some custom pages, and played with the settings to our liking.  It wasn't hard at all, and this is the work you have to do with every program out there.  Overall it was very easy.  Another good point about Product Cart is there customer service.  You do not wait days for an answer, they usually get back to you the same day and they do not mind to go to your site to fix it.    Their customer service is outstanding!  It is also great that they have this forum, because not every program has this.  It gives you an insight about customer satisfaction and you should check other product's forums for the same.  We use www.webhost4life.com for hosting.  Their technical support people are just as fast.  One last important thing is the search engine friendlyness.  Product cart has it added and we show up quite well in google.  This is a concern for database driven sites, they do not always show in search engines.  This can be a big issue with a costomers.  Product cart export to google base (formerly called froogle), and it can generate a site map.  These two features make it very search engine friendly.

Time for product entry will vary depending on what you need to do.
1. Do you have product images already created? If so that saves a lot of time. If not then it depends on how you will create the images, i.e. digital camera, scanning a catalog, pulling from a manufacturers CD, etc.

2. Do you have content for all of the products in electronic format (i.e. a database, spreadsheet, Word docs), or will you be manually typing content from a printed catalog or writing content from scratch?

Once you have the content in electronic format and the pics ready, actually creating the products manually in Product Cart or automatically by uploading a spreadsheet and FTPing the pics, it can go pretty quick.

In general we charge anywhere from $3/product (when they give us electronic copy and pics that are ready to upload) to $20/product (when we need to create pics and type content). If they give us the spreadsheet filled out correctly and the product pictures formatted correctly, we even do the initial product import for free.

Product Cart allows importing of an Excel file to populate the products in the database. See the User's Guide in the Product section. There is a complete explanation on importing products including the steps to take, the format of the file and explanation of all fields that can be imported.