What to Look For in a Shopping Cart Software
June 28, 2009 by Matthew Hunt
There are many different Internet Shopping Cart software and services available to e-commerce businesses, but how do you know if you are choosing the right software platform for your website business…? Below we will cover some questions you may want to ask yourself before getting set-up a specific shopping cart software.
3 common innocent mistakes that new e-commerce businesses make:
- The obvious is to make sure the shopping cart services are (SSL) Secure Socket Layer Certified – which is used to encrypt and protect data usually on an order from an online merchant’s website. Once the order has reached its destination the encrypted data is decoded. Merchant account providers will require your shopping card service to be SSL certified before approving your applications.
- Make sure know your shopping cart solution is compatible with your gateway provider which also needs to approved by your merchant account provider. It’s usually best to find your merchant account service provider then your gateway and lastly your shopping cart solution. Many e-commerce businesses do it backwards only end up having to re-do it all because each system doesn’t work with their merchant account providers.
- Another major mistake some online entrepreneurs make is they want to create and write their own shopping cart scripts or purchase ownership to one, but it is always better to invest in a service package instead, due to the “if not, you break it you fix it” and online merchants need to pick their battles.
You will want a service package or program that offers a (WYSIWYG) “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” editor. You also do not have time to write code for every new item you want to put up for sale. You also want to make sure it operates in html code so the search engines can read it and index your cataloged of items for sale.
Other important questions you want to ask and make sure your potential shopping cart system has:
- Does the service have an automatic site map generation?
- Does cart have customer order management: Can it automatically email customers? Allow customers to follow shipping? Shipping & Tracking
- Can it help you cross sell other similar products?
- Does it allow special features like VIP Clubs, Groups, Memberships, Quality Discounts, Kit/Gift Sets?
- Does it track inventory to help prevent out of stock issues?
- Can it list detailed product attributes?
- Does is have an affiliate module?
- Can you easily edit orders for customers/clients that have made a mistake ordering?
- Can do an order search? By phone number, zip/postal code, etc.
- Does it have a customer notes section?
- What payment gateways does it work? Are those payment gateways approved by the merchant account providers you are interested in using?
- Can the shopping cart service give statistical reporting: Sales reporting? Product breakdown? Shipping breakdown? Affiliate sales? Most popular sales? Best customers? Referring logs?
If your shopping cart service can do all the above then you are working with some powerful services and should be quite comfortable about your websites check out experience for both your customers and for your administration.
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