Professional Cart Solutions -
online shopping carts
ProCart offers everything from merchant
accounts to shopping carts to innovative audio marketing tools. Their
integrated eCommerce solutions allows you to sell products, services and
communicate with your clients through your website 24 hours a day, 7
days a week, automatically. There is no software to buy or install. They
also offer an integrated merchant account and shopping cart package.
Their merchant services put you in the driver's seat when it comes to
accepting credit cards payments. Add on their fully integrated shopping
cart and you instantly have a seamless, super simple and easy to use
ecommerce solution.
Choosing the Right Online
Shopping Carts
Are you a website owner or a web
designer/developer? If either applies, I would venture to say that
eventually you'll need an online shopping cart for one of your websites.
In fact, almost all new websites today need some sort of ecommerce
built-in, for the purpose of selling goods and services in the online
marketplace.
The greatest challenge is to find the
perfect online shopping carts solution for yourself and/or your
client. This task can be very overwhelming, considering, if you type
'shopping cart' into
Google.com, this search alone returns over 14.4 million hits! Most
of us don't have the time to sift through more than a few pages of a
search engine to find what we're looking for.
For the last 3 months, much of my time
has been devoted to researching as much shopping cart technology as I
could get my hands on. In general, shopping cart software ranges in
price from free to over $2000 for a single license and web hosted carts
range from $5 to hundreds of dollars per month. The studied carts cover
the spectrum of all web programming languages (ASP, ASP.NET, Cold
Fusion, Flash, Java, JavaScript & Perl shopping carts) and provide
limitless features as a whole. The problem is that locating YOUR perfect
cart with YOUR specific features can be a big task.
But no fear, just follow this
guaranteed step-by-step guide to locate it:
The Top 10 Steps to Finding the Best
Online Shopping Carts
Cost
How much money do you have to spend on
online shopping carts? The nice advantage is that there are shopping
carts with hundreds of features and they don't cost you a dime. They
are generally open source products. The only problem is that these same
"free shopping carts" can take hours of installation time and be fairly
difficult to configure. For a monthly fee, web hosting shopping carts
are made for users with little programming experience and allows them to
have an online storefront presence in no time.
Hosting vs. Software
There are two options in selecting your
overall online shopping carts solution. Either you get shopping cart software,
download it, install it on your web server, then configure the shopping
cart OR you get an online storefront (aka a hosted shopping cart) where
the configuration is very basic and the required setup time is minimal.
If you have some programming skills, I recommend buying a script and
installing it on your own. The nice thing is that you pay a one-time fee
for shopping cart software and the license is good for a lifetime. It's
approximately the same price to have a hosted solution for a year
compared to most one time shopping cart license fees.
Supported Gateways
What do I mean by gateways? Gateways
give shopping carts the ability to connect and securely process credit
card orders in real-time. Not all shopping carts are created equal.
Make sure that your client's merchant account is supported by the cart
you select. I have found that almost all carts support the larger online
payment processing companies, such as Authorize.net, PayPal and Verisign.
Shipping Options
Will you be shipping physical products?
If so, there are shopping carts that have built-in real-time shipping
options through DHL, UPS And USPS. Often times, the cart gives the user
the ability to view tracking orders and order status all from within
your secure shopping cart web interface. Also, there are shopping carts
with options to ship digital goods as well (files, programs, pictures,
music and others).
Technical Support
What kind of technical support does
your shopping cart offer? If you choose to purchase a script, be sure to
also subscribe to the shopping cart creator's newsletter, so that you
can stay on top of future updates to the software. Be aware that
technical support is generally available on a pay-per-incident basis, as
a yearly fee or in the rare case, free. Be sure to know what kind of
customer support guarantee the shopping cart comes with.
Security
Please, only buy a shopping cart if it
supports SSL (secure socket layer), with 128-bit encryption. As an
online storefront, remember that you are responsible for the safe
transfer of sensitive information (credit card and bank account
information) that is processed through your store. If any of the
sensitive information is accessible (stolen) from your website, you
could be liable. Be sure that you're purchasing a secure shopping cart
solution. Ask the creator's of the shopping cart what they do
specifically to protect the secure transfer of sensitive information.
Style Compatibility
Can you customize your shopping cart to
look like your website? There needs to be a seamless transition between
your website and your shopping storefront or your customers might get
hesitant in purchasing your products. There should be similar colors
and style layout to look professional and believable.
Extra Features
I just wanted to mention some of the
other features that I have discovered, which might be a critical point
in determining the shopping cart you want.
Affiliate Program - Offer your own
customized affiliate program through your shopping cart software.
Quickbooks Integration - Many carts allow direct integration with
Quickbooks.
Newsletter & Mailing Letter Managers -
The ability to stay in touch with your current customers and keep them
returning to your online store.
Custom Taxing Options - Create taxable
or tax-free products and have the ability to add various global tax
options at checkout.
World Languages & Currencies - Shopping
cart language translation and support for world currency might be a
necessary feature for your cart.
Error Free
You mean online shopping carts can have
errors? Of course. A private UK-based web testing firm found the
following, after studying a large group of UK online shopping carts for
a period of one month (24/7):"The majority of UK web sites are guilty of
leaving e-consumers stranded at the checkout empty handed, once they
have already spent valuable time browsing and selecting goods to
purchase. This is due to erratic functionality within shopping carts, at
a critical step in the online purchasing process."
"E-consumers are prevented from making
purchases on UK web sites for 9 hours and 30 minutes a month on average,
(115 hours a year)." "80 per cent of web sites perform inconsistently
with widely varying response times, timeouts and errors - leaving
consumers at best wondering what to do next and at worst unable to
complete their purchase successfully. This is potentially costing
e-retailers millions in lost sales from consumer frustrations." (http://www.scivisum.co.uk/report/ecommerce/)
Be sure to see what other users are
saying about a shopping cart that you might be interested in
purchasing. Any shopping cart errors could cost you thousands of
dollars in sales. Get a stable and secure cart.
Shopping Cart Directory
The following is a link containing a
directory of shopping carts that are categorized according to each of
the above-stated steps. Make shopping for shopping carts a breeze!
Shopping Cart Directory
If you have any questions or comments
about this article, please contact the author.
Evan Stevens (http://www.evanstevens.com)
is a professional web developer. This article reviews ecommerce online
shopping carts.
