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.

Check on the support for backing up files and allowing forexport into a variety of formats.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

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.

This should not be a critical feature but having anewsletter option would help in an online website promotion.

Having auto responders to gauge customer satisfaction aswell as to inform about special offers and promotions would help with the online marketing.

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.

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.