How Do You Choose A Shopping Cart For Your Business?
When deciding on what type of shopping cart and what features you need to have with your shopping cart you need to take a good look at the needs of your customers and at the needs of your business.
Your shopping cart can show your customer that you are a professional that they can trust in order to make a buying decision. The shopping cart is a very important part of your commerce website.
Your shopping cart should fit the size of your business including how many products you have and what features you will be using such as multiple items, discounts, shipping and payment options, the ability to collect contact information, the ability to process credit cards and echecks.
Your shopping cart needs to have the ability to save information, to calculate discounts, and sales tax and multiple purchases. Your shopping cart needs to look like your website and to look professional.
You need to have a shopping cart that fits your program skill level, and ability to make changes to it with html. You need to be able to see in real time what your sales figures are, who your buyers are and how many sales you have. The shopping cart should be able to give you accurate inventory totals based on sales generated.
Your shopping cart needs to be easy to navigate for your customers, blend well with your website, and be easy for you to make changes to. Your shopping cart should give your customer all the information needed when making a purchase including what items are in the cart, the quantity of each item, any options such as size, color etc., and any discounts or certificates available.
Your customer should be able to choose payment and shipping options right from the cart and should be able to see a total for their purchase prior to getting to the credit card information page.
The shopping cart needs to be able to give information that is accurate and responsive to what the customer does including changes made in any of the shopping cart fields.
You choose a shopping cart for your online business that meets the needs of your customers, and meets the skills and abilities of the person in charge of administering the shopping cart. The shopping cart should be able to grow with your business; meeting your future needs as well as filling the shopping needs you have today.
How Do Shopping Carts Know How To Fulfill Orders and Manage to Integrate The Accounting Needs
It can sometimes be a difficult task matching accounting systems with your order fulfillment system.
There are many categories of products on a Website: those products that are pending, those that are in back-order status, those that are to be drop-shipped, and those that have shipped.
An order management system must also be able to print up sales invoices, packing slips, address labels and inventory reports. Some management systems can actually interface directly with the main shippers such as FedEx, UPS and USPS. Your orders should be able to integrate directly into your accounting system if things are to work as smoothly as possible.
If you are a small merchant you may be thinking at this point that there is no way your shopping cart can handle all of this, well, the truth is that there are several ways that small merchants can deal with the needs of order fulfillment and accounting integration.
One way for small merchants to integrate order fulfillment with accounting is to select a shopping cart purposely because it has the order management features you want.
You can also import orders into an order management system on your desktop such as StoneEdge Order Manager from Stone Edge Technologies, Inc. or Dydacomp’s Mail Order Manager, which has Ecommerce Integration.
These order management systems can import orders from the following shopping carts: AmeriCart, Miva, ShopSite, Storefront, and Yahoo.
You can also start with an accounting program such as QuickBooks and use it to track your order fulfillment.
When using QuickBooks you may find value in using Fishbowl by Fishbowl Inventory. Fishbowl fits small to mid-sized companies and uses the QuickBooks platform for the accounting aspects and incorporates advanced inventory tracking that can handle multiple locations, manufacturing, credit card integration, UPS/FedEx integration and a complete wireless bar-coding for warehouse inventory as well as EDI, shopping cart and merchant services.
BusinessFlow by MainStreet Commerce is complete order management and multi-channel sales software that integrates with ecommerce as well as eBay sales. Order management is linked to inventory control, payment processing, marketing and also to customer relationship management.
No one likes it when an order gets messed up least of all the customer, so having a order management system that coordinates perfectly with your accounting system is vital to the success of your business.
When making your shopping cart decision take the time to check out similar Websites to see how they’re shopping cart works.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions of customer service before you buy the shopping cart. Know what your needs are regarding order fulfillment and accounting and make sure that what you buy fits the bill. Being able to track orders, know what is pending, what has been filled, what has shipped and what orders have been returned are all equally important.
Frequently Asked Shopping Cart Questions By Website Owners…
When designing a web presence website owners will run up against many questions concerning their website shopping cart. Gaining answers to frequently asked questions about shopping carts could help head off problems and save time and money.
One of the basic questions asked about the shopping cart is how to use it?
You should as a website owner guide your visitor to your shopping cart and have visible instructions both in text and in picture as to how to use the cart.
There are several steps to using the cart including product selection, reviewing the cart’s contents, payment into, checking out, and order confirmation. Each step should include plain and simple instructions for your customer so as not to confuse them and cause them to leave your site without completing the purchase.
Customers will need to know how to remove and edit items as they change their mind about purchasing items. Adding a FAQ (frequently asked questions section) can be helpful in answering any questions about removing or editing items.
Having a shopping cart system that is capable of saving items in the cart for later completion aids the customer in making the purchase at a later date when interruptions happen. This can actually help save the sale. This usually requires a registration.
Shopping carts can also handle subscriptions, free trials and discount coupons.
When considering shopping carts software find answers to these questions before making your decision. A shopping cart is a very important part of your website function and should command your undivided attention.
Shopping carts should be visible without being distracting from your products. Your shopping cart should complement your website design, not be flashy, and be easy to navigate.
Make sure that you add order buttons to your site, and that you match your shopping cart to your site design.
Shopping carts should allow for multiple items in your cart and to allow the buyer to change the quantity if necessary. The buyer should have the ability to delete an item if necessary or to save the contents of the cart for later.
The shopping cart you chose for your website is an important decision make sure that all of your shopping cart questions are answered to your satisfaction so that when purchasing from you your website visitors will be able to do so without having any questions of their own because you will have thought to insure a successful buying experience by selecting the proper shopping cart for your website.
Does An Online Shopping Cart Make Sense To You?
Anyone online who has items to sell needs to have some way for customers to make a purchase in a secure fashion. The answer that customers are beginning to expect from online merchants is to have a shopping cart.
A shopping cart is a virtual cart that is actually a software program or script. It is a series of pages that are either in JavaScript or PERL allowing data to be transferred as the buyer is taking actions along the buying journey.
The pages involved in this buying journey are all linked together within the shopping cart. There may be a page for each type of item, there may also be an order page link that will list all the purchases selected by the customer and gives the final price.
A shopping cart may be a mysterious thing for most online visitors but to those with technical knowledge the something mysterious is more often than not something that uses “cookies” that store the information the buyer is inputting along the buying journey such as the particular item chosen to be purchased, the size, color and also the quantity.
You can think of a virtual shopping cart as an online ordering system that use HTML code for “order buttons” that when a customer clicks on the buttons a page pops up from the ordering system, usually hosted on a different Website where the actual financial transaction takes place OR you can think of it as a store-building system in which the shopping cart is actually the store front and the items purchased are placed in a virtual shopping cart that stays on the site and the financial transaction takes place right there on the same site.
If you are selling 50 or more different products than you will be better off having a on-site shopping system that includes a online catalog, a managing system, a payment system and a shipping system.
A modern shopping cart is more like storefront software because of all the features it does including storing and analyzing data concerning the customers buying transactions.
Not all shopping carts are the same. Some carts are pretty basic and others have all kinds of bells and whistles on them and are quite expensive.
Basic shopping carts will typically allow a customer to make a few choices such as size, color and quantity. The more sophisticated storefront type shopping carts may show how many items are in the cart and what the running dollar amount total is as items are being added to the cart.
Shipping fees and tax calculations are done once the customer inputs a physical address to have the items shipped to. Shipping calculations are done using look-up tables that the merchant or administrator sets up or they are done by real-time calculations that major shippers and couriers input.
A cart that is up-to-date on shipping requirements will offer shipping options such as USPS, UPS and FedEx. Shipping calculations usually include sales total, weight, number of items, the zone being shipped from and to or a fixed shipping price for all products. Some systems allow for a special surcharge to be selected if the item is especially large or bulky.
Does all of this make any better sense to you?