#1: Layout Exactly What You Want

I have seen a lot of people say, “Hey, I want a website.” The problem is though that they really do not know what they want. For example, I did a website for a young man who was starting up a local graphics company. I advised him that the ordering process should be simple and since all graphics are custom, it might be better to have more of a contact form than an order form. He bounced the ideas around, I ended up having to do the order form over again about three times before he was satisfied. It started out very complex, then went to the contact form, and finally ended with a compromise between the two. These are things you really should think about before you contact a developer though. Get an idea of what you like and what you do not like before you do anything. What I even prefer, is that my clients go out and find websites that they like. Then tell me what they like about them. It gives me a good idea of the design preference as well as the layout of the website.

#2: Be Decisive

In the example above, you may be wondering “Why did you ever get started before asking him what he wanted for the order form then?” In all actuality, I did. I was simply trying to satisfy what he wanted since he was paying me for the work. When I would ask him, “what do you think about doing the order form this way?” His response would be, “That sounds okay.” He really just was not sure what he wanted. Therefore, when working with a developer and they ask you a question, you should know that they are going to take your response to heart. If you say something is okay, that means that it is okay and they can move on with the project. However, if you are unsure, tell them this so that they do not have to redo work.

#3: When you see things you do not like, notify them immediately

Sometimes as a developer I just make it my responsibility to do things like I would like them done. This means that on occasion I can find myself doing something that the customer does not want. This is not a big problem as I take that risk. However, it can sometimes be frustrating to be working on a certain portion of the website for a while, and then have them notify me several days after the fact that I have put hours into it that it isn’t something they want. Just try to keep them up to date.

#4: Be Patient

A lot of times developing a website is done all behind the scenes. Forms do not naturally work as they are intended as soon as you can see them on a website. There is some backend coding that causes them to become functional in the way you would want them to be. Therefore, sometimes you may not see any progress for days at a time. A good developer will notify you of this. However, do not panic if they don’t. Just email them, ask them what the status is, and they should tell you. Most websites will take weeks to develop especially if you are working with an individual so you will have to have patience.

#5: Never Pay All of It Upfront

With any developer, myself included, I would encourage you to not pay the entire amount of upfront. Most developers will require that you pay something. However, this is usually 20% of the total amount in my experience. After this, they may ask you to pay installments as the project moves along. However, you should be leery of developers who want the entire amount upfront.

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As you begin you new business venture online there are some recommendations that may help you with this process. Creating a website that will fit the needs of your online company is an important first step. If you do not know how to create your own site, then you will want to hire a web designer that can do this for you. You want to have a website that is unique. You want something that people will remember.

If you are going to hire a web designer, then you will want to do some research on what company best fits your needs. You want someone that is experienced so that you will get a good product for the money that you will spend on this service. Checking customer reviews is a great way to learn about how a company really works. You will want to make a list of your needs so that you can limit the amount of research you will have to do in order to find the right company.

Once you have found a design for your site, you are ready for the next set of developing your ecommerce business. You are going to want software that will help your customers will buying your products. Software will also allow them to register or login as returning customers. This software is often referred to as store management software or solution software. Both are designed to help you run all aspects of your business.

There are many different software companies on the market. It can be difficult to find the one that best fits your needs. One of the best things that you can do before you really get started is to make of list of the top three to five most important features that you consider necessary for you to manage your site. Once you have your list, you will be able to eliminate a lot of the companies that do not match or cannot match all of your needs. You do not want to forget about how much you are willing to spend to get the right company. This can be a very big factor in which company you will end up choosing.

Eliminating all the companies that do not fit your needs will save you a lot time. Once you have done this, you will want to find out how the company treats its customers. Some question that you may want to ask are “what the response time in customer service is” and “what kind of technical support that they offer.” These are just a few of the question that may not be answered in the customer reviews that you will want to read. A good way to test these particular areas is to send a set of “test” questions to see how they respond firsthand. This is one way to know that you are getting the best for your ecommerce business.

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Know Your Top Important Needs
Making the list of the most important needs that the ecommerce solution company should have will be a time saver. Being able to eliminate companies that do not fit your needs will keep you from spending hours reviewing companies that are just not compatible.
Write out the list of needs that way you are not tempted to change them. Once you have decided what is most important, you will want to stick with those. If you change them too much, then you are going to find yourself going back and forth trying to make a decision. The best thing to do is to make the list and stick with it.
Here are some typical questions that you might ask yourself about your site:
• What is the goal of your website?
• Who will be visiting your website the most?
• What do you want to spend on a solution company?

Make a List of Ecommerce Solution Companies
Once you have made a list of your needs that you expect from one of the companies then you need make a list of the companies that meet most of the requirements. This will help you review only the ones that meet at least 2/3 of your requirements. You may find a company that may not meet all of your requirements, but has an alternative option that will benefit you more.
The list that you have compiled of solution companies can be used to check out other customer reviews. This is a great way to learn how this company responds to customer service and technical support. You do not want company that has a slow response time.

The Best Company For You
Choosing the best company for you can be a little bit of a daunting task. Making a list of your needs and comparing them to the list of companies that offer these things may not give you many options or it can give too many options. The best thing you can do is to take the time to review each possible prospect. You do not want to end up with a company that really does not hold up to their end of the deal. Reading customer reviews is a great way to learn about a company, but another way is send them “test” question to see how they respond. This will give you a firsthand look on how they handle their customers. In the end, this option may help you decide which company is best for you.

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If you are truly concerned, I would start out by asking the developer to provide the documentation on how to integrate it. This will likely give you a good perspective on what to expect. If the developer will not give you access to that, this could be a red flag that perhaps there is not good documentation or that it could end up being far more difficult than one would hope for.

I have seen some shopping carts that it is just a matter of putting a single line of code into your website. It will show up, look great, and you will never have a problem. Others will require that you manipulate every page of the shopping cart from beginning to end. You will need to build your website around the shopping cart, change button colors, alter the css file, and make other various HTML changes. These are a pain, and should be avoided when possible if they do not have the proper documentation. A good shopping cart will make it easy to alter the size, structure, and layout of the shopping cart. They might even have different themes available that might help you to match your existing design. When all else fails and you have odd colors, you might even just have to change a little bit of CSS to really get it looking like you would want it to look. It starts with good documentation though from the developer.

The importance of having an integrated shopping cart often goes overlooked. I will even go on to say that it lacks professionalism when it is not done properly. Some companies feel that simply having their banner or logo on the page of the shopping cart is good enough. To be honest though, this is not the extent I consider integration to be. If the buttons and colors of the shopping cart do not match your website, then this is not true integration. This is just something that lacks professionalism in my opinion.

When people are in the ordering process, it is natural for people to frequently back out. They might just be checking the final price on one of your items. However, others will place something in their shopping cart and the ordering process gives them time to ponder. Do they really need the item? Is this the right company to buy from? Is this the cheapest available on the internet? These are all questions that will run through almost every buyers mind. Why do you want to give them a reason to doubt the professionalism of your company? This is something that will cross their mind if you have a poorly done job on integrating your shopping cart. You want to give them every reason to buy from you, not every reason to leave your site. In the end, with good integration you will find that you will be much more pleased with your conversion ratios when people visit your shopping cart if it is integrated properly and matches your website as closely as possible.

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1. Narrow Down Your Choices
First of all, you will want to narrow down the list of possibilities. There is no way that you could possibly review hundreds of shopping cart options; most of which would be a waste of your time. You do not want to become overwhelmed by software that would not meet your requirements to begin with.
A good way to narrow down your list is to look at prices and features that the software offers. You can eliminate a lot by knowing the features you would require for your online store. This will save you a lot of time since this will eliminate a number of possibilities. Knowing your price range is also a great way to eliminate what you cannot afford. You don’t want to spend time reading reviews on software that you can afford to purchase.

2. Know What Is Important
Knowing what your online store would require is the key to finding the best software. If you know the top 3 important requirements then you will less likely be bombarded with too much information. Once you know what you are really looking for you can start to eliminate the software choices that do not fit your needs.
Once you have narrowed down your choice, you may want to contact the vendor about how their software would support the different applications. Many times vendors can lead you to demos that will you show you exactly how the different applications will work for your site.This will save you a lot time.

3. Learn About The Customer Service
It is important to know the quality of their customer service. A good way to test this out is to send an email with a few questions about sales. You will want to pay attention to how quickly your questions were answered as well as what kind of format did they use to answer your questions. For example, did they just use some kind of programmed response instead listening to what you actually needed?
You will also want to check out the technical support that is offered. This is a major component in running an ecommerce business.

4. Find Reviews Written By Users
Reading the reviews of actual users is a great way to learn about shopping cart software. Users will often outline the pros and cons of the product for you. This will help you eliminate software that has a lot of negative reviews without wasting much of your time. This is also a great way to find software is highly ranked among users.

Using these four tips for finding shopping cart software for your online store; you will greatly increase the odds of finding the perfect software quickly. These tips will keep you from spending hours researching software that will not work for you business.

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Once you get people there, you want them to continue to return as well. A great option to get people to come is to offer discounts or special onetime deals. Many sites offer a small discount on your first order. This is the kind of thing that a lot of users are looking for. “Buy one, get one” is a great tactic to get people to your site. People truly feel that they are getting a great deal with these kinds of offers. Free shipping on orders that are more than a certain amount is also a good way to get people to buy from you. If there are two products for the same amount, then the price of shipping could be the deciding factor. Eliminating the shipping will greatly increase your chances of a sale in a large market.

Placing your items for sell on sites such as eBay and Amazon will greatly increase the traffic and the possibility of sales. Your items on a popular shopping site with a back link to yours will allow the purchaser to search your site for more items. This will give you a higher percentage of a sale and a return visit.

Once you get people to your site, you want to use this opportunity to prompt them to return. Offering customers a place to sign up for newsletters or updates is a great way to remind people of your site since these reminders will go directly to their personal email address. Emailing new deals is a great way to increase your odds of returning customers. Emailing customers is great, but often times these emails are just deleted. Using a strong tag line offering a great deal will increase the odds of them actually reading the email or newsletter. Frees shipping or new product information is great way to get their attention.

While you are trying to get people to your site, you are going to come across things like AdWords offered by Google. This is a great way to generate traffic to your site, but these services are not free. Generating traffic to your site will mostly cost you some money at one point in time. Using a “pay per click” service is definitely a great option for getting your web address available for a lot of people to see. Though this kind of service is not a guarantee, it will still increase the odds of visitors. The more visitors that you have; the higher chance you have to make money. There is no way to guarantee how much money you will make, but this service gives you a better chance of visitors to your site on a daily basis.

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Maintenance is Made Easy

You may be thinking at this point that you will only be selling a few products on your site. However, countless people have become successful online and they want to offer new brands of their products or simply offer other items all together. Therefore, I always encourage people to find a shopping cart that will allow them to easily maintain their products. If it does not, then it really does leave you at a disability of expanding your business in the future.

The Shopping Cart Meets Your Needs

Unless there is simply no way to get around it, always try to find a shopping cart that meets your needs perfectly. Although PHP developers are plentiful, they do not always like to work on pre-existing code that they are not familiar with. It takes them more time to learn the code before they can actually make changes to it. Since this is the case, it will often pay off in the long run to pay a little bit more for a shopping cart that is already in perfectly working condition for you upon its initial setup on your website. Not only this, but the developer is also responsible for maintaining this portion of the script instead of you forking over money to get it updated as well after each time the shopping cart is upgraded to a newer version.

Trim the Fat!

Many people make the mistake of getting a shopping cart that has a ton of features. They feel that more features means much more value. However, this is really a misconception. More features frequently means that it will be more confusing for you to update. As well, it could cause your ordering process to be more complex, which is something you want to avoid in the world of ecommerce. In theory, you ideally want to get the information from clients as quickly as possible to not allow them the time to change their mind. Therefore, asking unnecessary questions, having a 10 step order process, or anything as should be avoided when possible. Finding a shopping cart that simply meets your needs is more ideal than one with too many features.

Customer Service is Important

Even though the script looks professional in the demo, it does not always mean that the documentation you receive when you make the purchase is going to be of the same quality. Undoubtedly, the best of developers may need help from the company in getting it setup properly. The unfortunate part is that not all companies do a good job of helping their customers. This means that this is something you should check before you make the purchase. It can simply be done by contacting them with a few questions about the script. Typically the timeframe that it takes for them to respond as well as the quality of their response is something you can expect as well if you have other questions after the purchase. It pays off in the end to check all your bases possible before buying any shopping cart software.

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Must Be Easy to Update Your Website

The most frustrating thing that can happen to anyone is to get their website up and running. The developer helped you get the products added to the website, you go live, and a few weeks later you realize that there are some missing items. You should be aware of how to update your website, because it is only going to be a matter of time before you have a desire to do so. You will want to tweak wording and change things to hopefully help you improve your sales. Believe it or not, there are some shopping carts on the market that make this process near impossible for anyone who is not familiar with HTML or PHP Programming. With that said, if I were you, I would make sure that before you purchase a PHP shopping cart that you understand how to update your products and those types of things. It will save you a headache in the end.

Must Have Good Support from Developers

It is simply natural that anyone who purchases a script is going to have some questions. They will want to know how to work a specific feature, how to set something up, or if there can be a feature added in a future release. Unfortunately, not all shopping carts are supported well. You essentially buy them “as is” and the minute you make your payment you are left on your own to figure things out or fix problems that might be in the script. The tip I offer to anyone who wants to see how good support is, is to simply ask a few questions to their customer service. Generally, in small businesses the people helping in sales / customer service will be the same people answer technical questions after you purchase the script. You will get a good idea of how helpful they will be, how clear their emails are, and how quick you might get a response. It is safe to say that no response probably means you will not get a response when you purchase the script and ask a question then either.

The Shopping Cart Meets But Does Not Surpass Your Needs

This is a tough line to follow because the first priority is to ensure that the script contains all of the features you might need. However, having one with too many can be almost an equally bad thing. Shopping carts with too many features can quickly become so complex that you will find it hard to manage your website. As well, those shopping carts that will virtually work for any website may have a very complex ordering form. This is not something you want if you really do not need it. The idea with ordering forms online is to have exactly what you need and nothing more. Therefore, even a script with too many features may need to be heavily modified just as if one you purchase that maybe does not have all the features you need. Therefore, both are going to cost you money. It is better to find a shopping cart as close to what you need as possible. It will save you money in the long run.

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Easy to Maintain

Even though you may be only selling a few products upon the release of your site, there is no telling at this point whether you might have a desire to add other products in the future. If this is the case, you do not want the process to be extremely difficult for you, or something that you have to dish out more money to make happen. The purpose of having a quality shopping cart is to be able to do these types of things pretty easily as well as making the ordering process simple for your customers.

It Has the Features that You Need

One of the biggest priorities in choosing a shopping cart is that you must have one that meets your needs. There are many people who take a look at a shopping cart, they buy it, and their intentions are to modify to fit their needs. However, with the vast amount of shopping carts on the market, you should be able to find one that meets most any need right out of the gate. The only exception would be if you just had some idea that was so unique that it would almost have to be custom built. Then, I would consider having your shopping cart built from scratch, not purchasing one with the intention of having it modified.

Not Too Bloated with Unnecessary Features

Having all the features you need in a shopping cart is priority over finding one that has too many. However, you still want to find one that is not overly bloated with features you will never use. This just makes maintaining your site more complicated. As well, the shopping cart may have questions and other things that are unnecessary during the ordering process. These are called bloated questions and should be avoided when possible. For example, if your product is sent via email or available to download, then you probably do not need a shipping address. If you can find one that meets your needs, then stick with that one. Too many features is not a good thing.

Good Customer Service

Although you may have found a shopping cart that has everything you need, there is still one key thing you should be looking for before making a purchase. You should verify that the developer of the script has good customer service. Although many popular developers will have forums and you can see how active they are, others may only take questions via email. If this is the case, simply send an email to them and ask them a few generic questions about the shopping cart. You can evaluate their response and determine whether it is sufficient. It will be a good indication of what you can expect as well if you run into a problem of any kind after the purchase.

Updated Regularly

This is not always a requirement, but it is something just to take a quick look at. Almost always any script will have some problems with it. It may have a few features that are not working properly or some processes that could be done better. The best of shopping carts are no different. Typically, a shopping cart in beta stages or one that has not been updated for a very long time may be okay, others may have problems that are not being addressed. You should verify with the developer selling the script how often the script is updated with new features or fixing bugs. This is also a good indication that if you have a problem, it might be addressed by the developer quickly.

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The Benefits

#1: Easy to Setup

If you are doing a completely custom website, it would take several weeks to get completely setup the way you want. Most businesses simply require a lot of time to be able to complete a job. However, when you get ecommerce shopping cart hosting they will almost always help you setup your shopping cart and get you going pretty quickly. They do it all the time, so they are pretty quick about getting it done.

#2: Good Customer Service

The average web hosting customer service you might get probably will not help you with problems that come up with your shopping cart. Instead, you will have to either figure it out on your own or contact the developers of the script to get help with any problem. When you have ecommerce shopping cart hosting, they are more likely to help you get rid of any problems you may find with your shopping cart itself.

#3: Frequently More Suggestions

This is particularly the case if you are going with ecommerce shopping cart hosting with a relatively small business. They naturally have more interest in ecommerce themselves. With that being the case, and with their more often than not vast amount of experience in ecommerce, they might help push you into the right direction that you need to go. General web hosting the people only help you if your website is down or you have specific problems related to their service. Beyond that, you are on your own most of the time.

The Disabilities

#1: Limited in what you can do

Almost all ecommerce shopping cart hosting uses one, maybe two different kinds of shopping carts. You really do not have a lot of options when it comes to which shopping cart they will setup. This being the case, they will do the bare minimum of a default installation and pretty much leave you at that. It is your responsibility to change anything over that.

#2: More Expensive

You may be thinking I am lying here. But in reality, you are intending for your business to be thriving in roughly a year. Most ecommerce shopping cart hosting I have seen is roughly four times more expensive than standard web hosting. In that time, you could probably purchase most decent shopping carts several times over in what you have invested in monthly expenses of ecommerce shopping cart hosting. Therefore, I still recommend that you weigh out the options for you from a money situation. It could pay off to fork over a little bit of extra money and purchase a good shopping cart and get it installed on cheaper web hosting.

#3: Default is what you get

If you think that just because you purchase ecommerce shopping cart hosting that they will help you setup your products, change colors, and modify the script for you, you must be living a dream world. Businesses almost always will do the bare minimum. It increases their profit margin because they are spending less time doing things. Therefore, when you search for ecommerce shopping cart hosting, you must look at how the demo appears. You probably will not get much more than what is shown there, if anything. That includes changing themes or doing anything to alter the visual appearance of your website as well.

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