The online shopping cart is an essential tool you must have if you want to operate a real Internet business, sometimes known as e-commerce. If you are selling products on your site, you need a way to record sales, take the customer’s contact and payment information and initiate the delivery of the product. If the product is a downloadable one, such as an e-book, audio or video, the shopping cart should actually complete the delivery automatically on receipt of payment.
There are many shopping carts available, but if you don’t choose wisely they can cause you headaches and perhaps even doom your online business to failure before you even begin.
To help you start your research, here are the top 5 essential features you should look for in choosing your e-commerce shopping cart:
1. It should be hosted on the cart’s server, not yours. Honestly, unless you are a techie, or have on on your staff full time, you do NOT want to deal with the hassles (and there are many!) of hosting the cart yourself.
2. It must have real time credit card processing capability. People buy online for convenience, and often on impulse. Especially with downloadable products, they want to get them right away. This can only happen if your shopping cart can process their credit card or PayPal payment right away.
3. The shopping cart process must be encrypted. This means the customer’s contact and payment information is protected and can’t be stolen by cyberthieves during the process. Without this, your sales will never take off.
4. It should be intuitive and user friendly, both for your customers and yourself. Studies consistently show that if you don’t make it easy for people to buy your stuff — they won’t! And as for you, you want to spend your time attracting customers and making sales, not figuring out how to operate your shopping cart!
5. It must offer top quality customer support. Even with the best system in place, technical glitches can happen, and there are also things you’ll want to do that you won’t know how to do. You must be able to contact the support department and get answers to your questions fast. So check out the support aspect in choosing an online shopping cart.
As I said at the beginning, the shopping cart is an essential part of your online business, and you need to choose it carefully. Make sure you get these five features on your online shopping cart, and your online business will be off to a great start.