How to Pick an Ecommerce Shopping Cart

Finding the right shopping cart is not an easy task. It often takes lots of time in research and you really have to analyze where you want to go with your store. You do not want to be too restricting by going with an overly simple one where you may not be able to add products and things. At the same time, you may not have a demand for one that has all the bells and whistles. This is why there are so many out there. Many have different options that you may or may not need. It is now time to go through and figure out which one will work best for you. Below is the method that I recommend you use to finding the right one.

Develop a List

Start out by doing some searching. You can ask other people what they use, look at other ecommerce websites, and you might even do a search to find some fairly popular ones. It is okay if you start out with a fairly lengthy list. While putting it together, you might as well go ahead and eliminate those that you know you definitely will not want. However, if you are not developing the list and just found it online, you may need to use the two following methods to help eliminate several of them.

Remove Shopping Carts That Are Bloated

First off, you should already have a good idea of what you want your website to look like. Likewise, you should also have a fairly good understanding of the procedure you want your website visitors to go through to purchase a product. Keep in mind: the more simple it is the more sales you will get. Do not ask questions that you do not care about.

Therefore, go through your list and look for shopping carts that may have this quality about them. You want to avoid shopping carts that require your website visitors to input too much information. Or, if the backend is too complicated and simply difficult to use because it has too many features, you should remove those as well.

Remove Shopping Carts That Do Not Meet Your Criteria

There are a huge variety of shopping carts out there. Some though will only allow for certain merchant accounts or have other restrictions. Quickly eliminate those from the list that may cause you problems down the road. You should look for those that are as closely as what you have in mind and nothing less. You certainly do not want to make too many sacrifices on your website where it does not have the process that you wanted to have. Get as close to what you had in mind as possible and other things can be added or removed later on down the road.

Check the Customer Service

Check for good customer service. While the best idea would be to just set it up and never have to deal with them, this is likely not going to be the case. You will probably need their help in someway to get it setup exactly right. You can simply check their service by sending the shopping carts customer service an email and ask them a few questions.

There are a couple of things you should look at. First, you want them have a timely response. If they are extremely slow (more than three days in my opinion) then I would avoid them. They likely will not help you with more difficult things if they can not even answer the simple questions you are asking.

Last, but not least, make sure their responses are not “canned” and remain professional. Good quality customer service means that their answers will be tailored to your questions. They are not simply automated or lack professionalism.

Remove the shopping carts from your list if they do not have good customer service.

The Final Stage

By now, your list should be fairly small. Now, simply read others reviews and pick one that you like the most. If you feel that one shopping cart was especially good in customer service, reviews, or very close to what you like, then simply pick that one. You will find that the closer you get to what you had in mind originally, the more pleased you will be with it later on.

Learn how you can increase your Internet business with ecommerce shopping cart software, content management system software, and email marketing software by Interspire.

Setting Up Your Virtual Store

Online stores are heavily populating the World Wide Web. It became an instant internet craze which opened every single computer user to a possibility of becoming a successful e-commerce businessman. This fad turned many people into setting up their own online stores, and encouraged those giant ecommerce sites like Ebay and Amazon to make things easier for their subscribers by setting up ready-to-use online stores. Because of these features and offers of established e-stores, setting up one is as easy as breathing. However, one still needs to strategize and plan wisely so that the business won’t be among those short-lived businesses which start to fail after a month or so.

Lay Out and Templates

Now that you have successfully decided which products to sell, an Internet Merchant account already approved and an Online Shopping Cart purchased- you’re almost good to go. Next step is to design your own site. There are some sites which offer templates or ready to use lay-outs for e-stores. However, I strongly recommend you not to use these ready-made templates because you will lose the chance of customizing your e-stores appearance that is supposed to be coordinated with what you are selling. Experimenting things up with the designs, colors, lay out is a thing which you could easily learn, or if it pains you a lot, you may ask someone to do what you want your site to look like.

Easy Browsing

Customers want everything the easy way- that is the rule of thumb. They want a transaction completed in a few clicks of their mouse. This is the reason why you need to pay extra attention in building your site because a website which loads forever will never be appreciated by customers.

Keep your site clean and neat. Remove any unnecessary images but leave a striking logo- something that customers will remember. A user-friendly navigation bar is an indispensable tool in e-stores and even for almost all websites because it directs the customers to pages they want to go to in a very timely manner.

Your Website Host

In finding the best website host to cater to your website’s needs, there are many factors to take into consideration: First, see to it that the website offers Secure Server Locket (SSL) Encryptions. Above all other websites, e-store websites need this the most because e-stores involve money transfers and transactions. Expect an additional charge for this SSL, as compared to ordinary website hosting.

Second, seek for a host which guarantees a high up-time, meaning the guarantee that your site will always be online. If the uptime of a server is not that high, it may hurt your business a lot as it won’t be available for browsing over the net. Also check their guarantee of backing up files in case of system errors or malfunctions.

Web logs and statistics should also be considered because by monitoring the logs and statistics, you can analyze the volume of traffic coming into your site. You can also gain information about the statistics of your customers, thus giving you the chance to present ideas on retaining them and attracting more.

Lastly, delve on their customer support. The customer support is a very valuable aspect in maintaining your site’s availability on the web. Check the hosting company’s other customers and asks them the real score of the host; that way, you could expect the service they would give you.

Your Website/ Domain Name

You’re not done yet- and this is the most important step in setting up a website. Giving your site a good domain name is definitely something which you should not miss. While you would want to give your site the name of your e-store, it would be hard for you to market it and compete with hundreds to thousands of other e-stores. Try using keywords which sells the most, say for example your e-store sells flowers, you may search for the keywords pertaining to the product and use it as your domain name- e.g. flowersforallseasons.com. If you can limit your domain name to no more than three words, the better it would be so that customers can remember your site well. It is also a good edge if you have .com as your domain name system. People tend to remember sites with this ending compared to others.

Moving a step closer

You’re a step away from starting your online business and the next task is already predictable- yes, marketing your site online, it is. But there is no need to hurry, be sure to take all factors into consideration because marketing strategies won’t work well if you have missed any of the steps mentioned above.

Learn how you can increase your Internet business with ecommerce shopping cart software, content management system software, and email marketing software by Interspire.