How to Select on Electronic Shopping Cart Program

A great electronic shopping cart program is central to your online business. In fact, for many customers, it IS your business. Paying customers will notice more about how your shopping cart works--or fails--than anything else about your website. Be certain that your shopping cart program creates a smooth customer experience. Meanwhile, for efficient back office operations, make sure it also integrates smoothly with your accounting program and product database.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

1. Look for an electronic shopping cart program that offers software wizards to ease you through the technical minefields, including customizing your cart offerings, integrating your cart with your product database and uploading, importing and exporting multiple products simultaneously.

2. Insist on a shopping cart program that lets your customers view their order and what they are doing during every step of a transaction, click directly back to product detail pages, save their cart at any time without abandoning the transaction and store their payment, address, and gift data.

3. Shop for a shopping cart program that offers you around the clock customer support so that you don't lose sales while a customer is waiting for you to resolve a glitch.

4. Plan ahead and select a shopping cart program that will handle and integrate any type of customer or transaction you will ever serve, including wholesale, discount, special sales and offline.

5. Enhance your website by looking for promotional power in your shopping cart service offerings. Features such as coupons, email-a-friend, shipping notification emails, data feeds to shopping search sites like Froogle and Google Base and search engine optimization of your product detail pages will power your e-commerce and reduce extraneous work. This is particularly true when they are included in your integrated shopping cart functionality.

6. Integrate your shopping cart with your merchant credit card gateway, your PayPal account and customer friendly services such as Yahoo! Wallet and Google Checkout to let your customers have it their way on the way to your payday.

7. Verify on the front end that your shopping cart program will accommodate such offerings as store credit, terms and payments on open invoices if you ever intend to offer them.

8. Study the Shopping Cart Software Reviews at TopTenReviews.com and select an electronic shopping cart (see Resources below). If you're in doubt, consider an inexpensive 30 day trial.

Tips & Warnings

• Some web hosting services offer electronic shopping cart functionality as part of their bundled offerings. Be careful. You want integrated services, and the best value you get in several areas--shopping cart, web hosting, accounting and product database--but bundling does not guarantee value, quality or seamless integration.
• Off the shelf boxed shopping cart software is very expensive and is less likely to stay current with updated versions and your evolving site integration needs without an expensive investment in professional programming time.

Resources

• Shopping Cart Software Reviews at TopTenReviews.com

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[jane0379]

on 11/9/2008 I wish I could save everybody from the pain I have been through with shopping carts. That would be by telling them to use a hosted shopping cart like the one I have been using www.creatiq.com/haiku - where it is fully managed, you get free upgrades (because they go out of date so quickly) and is really affordable too!