|
||
A shopping cart serves as the frontend that transfersinformation through a secure connection to a payment gateway. The paymentgateway interacts with your merchant bank account to process the information. Itthen sends back a confirmation or denial back to the shopping cart software.
Building your own customized shopping cart may not give youas many features as available in third party shopping carts. There are a numberof online shopping carts available. Before purchasing a cart keep a smallchecklist handy so that you can pick the right one.
Shoping cart scripts are written in many different codingformats - PERL, PHP, ASP etc. check compatibility with your host beforepurchasing.
How easy is a cart to install on your server? Can the codebe modified to give the same look and feel as your website? These are someareas you would need to check before making a purchase.
Back-up files support
Check on the support for backing up files and allowing forexport into a variety of formats.
Payment gatewayservices supported
Most carts support multiple gateway services. Beforepurchasing your cart, review the gateway services supported as well as thecompatibility of the payment gateway with your merchant account.
Order CompletionDetails
Ensure that the shopping cart has an option to send an emailconfirmation when a customer completes an order as well as a reminder to printthe order details.
Provide a choice ofShipping Carriers
For confirmed orders the customer should be able to linkdirectly to the carrier site so as to track the progress of shipment. Theshipping should be able to offer a choice of carriers. In addition the cartshould be able to calculate shipping and tax in real time from USPS, USP, FEDEXetc. as well as provide an option to include or keep shipping costs separate.
Multiple Productupload
The cart should give you the option of bulk uploading ofproducts. The product pages should be SEO friendly. While uploading productimages do you have to put in one large image and one small image of everyproduct or can you just put in one image and auto generate thumbnails? If you auto generate thumbnails you savetime, web space and bandwidth. In addition you should also be able to createand manage your product attributes.
Content managementtool
Check if the store has the option to add new content pages.This is important as you need to serve content pages for the crawlers to pickup and display your web pages.
Newsletter functions
This should not be a critical feature but having anewsletter option would help in an online website promotion.
Gift certificates,promotions and discounts
Having auto responders to gauge customer satisfaction aswell as to inform about special offers and promotions would help with the online marketing.
Search EngineFriendly features
Some shopping carts provide a number of search enginefriendly parameters that can be customized for all the uploaded products. Checkif the cart supports addition of title tags, meta tags, alt tags, breadcrumbsfor optimization. This would be an important aspect as you want your productsto be reachable to a wider audience.
Most product pages are displayed with query strings andhamper indexing of the site product pages. Since the main purpose of sellingproducts is for the product pages to be ?found? it is important that the cartprovides an option to change query strings to static urls. This will ensurethat the site is accessible to search engines and may contribute to improved search engine rankings.
Also check if the cart provides the option of a sitemap oran XML sitemap generation.
Affiliate modules andBanner Advertising controls
Some carts support affiliate modules. If your website has arequirement then check to see that affiliate module should be able to handlethe signing up process, track statistics, provide payment details made toaffiliates.
Keep the checklist in mind, however base your choice on thetype of products you sell and the catalog of products.
Your business might already be set up with a mini-site and Paypal or other financial payment button. But often website shoppers might be getting lost as the site changes over to the processing institution’s software system, different site look and navigation upon checking out. However, there is a solution. You could have more enhanced processing features and options and even extend your sales reach with a shopping cart system.
Shopping cart software today has a variety of tools to help with your marketing and sales. For example, some carts allow you to build your own virtual showroom with the help of a wide range of templates and layouts that coordinate with your website. Such a powerful web presentation often results in increased activity and sales due to a much smoother transition from shopping to checking out. Thus with your own cart, you can not only offer a better processing look, you can monitor activity to see if you lose people due to navigation and other issues and revise as needed on our own.
With a shopping cart, you also have more freedom to set up customized messages and immediately have customers entered into your database and accounting systems. Whereas with financial options like Clickbank and Paypal, you need to set up a special bridge to get people to subscribe to your autoresponder somehow, doing a 2-step or missing out on lead captures altogether.
Other Enhanced Cart Features
Once people have stepped into your online show room, they might enjoy viewing your products that can be bundled together with shopping cart software. You can upload digital images along with some copywriting or short classified spots to make your products more attractive, too, inside the shopping area so that shoppers can view a particular product by zooming in and out, with the help of an interactive image viewer.
And for shoppers making their selections who would like multiple purchase options to send a gift to someone, you can find tools for this with shopping cart software. Plus you can also introduce shipping orders such as UPS plus coupon systems.
You can also offer multiple payment options to your clients so that they can pay you online through via credit cards without Paypal, for those who don’t have access to it in their countries or for other reasons. Plus you could offer offline credit card processing when Internet or phone land-lines may be down or for cell phone callers or fax clients by heading to eBay and picking up an inexpensive swipe machine and / or adjusting your shopping cart software to process offline transactions.
Shopping carts also allow you to monitor the status of your business in real time. So you can keep a track of any transactions between your enterprise and the clients. And you can learn when an order is placed, the status of the order and whether the order has been delivered. You can use cart software to find out the sales updates from the sales reporting tools, integrate your sales and order- related info with QuickBooks for easy accounting and your products to list in eBay auctions for another money-making avenue, and import and export your whole customer database for your records.
So give your customers the feeling of shopping in a supermarket, an online supermarket. Let them browse, select products add them to their shopping cart and place an order via multiple ways.
The easier and more fun it is for your shoppers, the more likely they’ll return – and tell their friends. Keep your customer satisfaction in mind when you plan those Paypal buttons on mini-sites. And learn more about shopping carts plus get help setting yours up at 24/7.