Shopping Cart Shopping

For many online businesses, the shopping cart is the heart of the online business, enabling site visitors to browse your product offerings, check prices, shipping options and finally place their order.

As the heart of the online business, having a shopping cart that is tailored to your business cannot be over emphasized.

If you are looking for a shopping cart, here are some questions to start off the process. Ask yourself these questions before talking to a web development company.

• Tax options for your jurisdiction
  
• Shipping options for your products. If you are selling a virtual product then you will need support for downloads. If your product is large and heavy, shipping to countries outside North America may be expensive. Do you customers want your product in a hurry, or is a slower shipping method acceptable?
  
• Search Engine Friendly? Regardless of the type of business you have, you are going to want the search engine crawlers to access the pages that make up your shopping cart. Crawability is only one Search Engine issue. Other issues include, duplicate content and Session IDs.
  
  
• Abandoned Carts. Just as in brick and mortal stores, customers do not always complete their purchase for one reason or another. The problem of abandoned carts online is a multi-million dollar headache for online merchants. Some shopping carts, notably OsCommerce come with plug-in modules for emailing customers who do not complete their purchases. This is a fairly simple functionality to program into an existing application and will pay for itself many times over.
  
• Product Display. Does the Shopping Cart software display your products to best advantage? Depending on your product, you may want 3 or 4 pictures, showing different views of each product. This is a very easy functionality to program, and if it displays your products to better advantage, it will be well worth it.
  
• Inventory and Statistics. Many merchants prefer to keep their inventory software separate from their online shopping cart, while others prefer an integrated solution. Integrating your inventory control programs for online and offline sales may be more than it is worth, especially at the outset, nevertheless it is worth considering and asking your web development company for details.
  
  
• Accounting Integration. Many shopping carts offer a feature where the sales information collected in the Shopping cart can be exported to popular accounting software such as Quickbooks.
  
• Content. Is your website going to be simply an online store, or are you going to have other areas such as articles, free information, resources, or information about your company? This is very important to decide at the beginning! Generally, the search engines prefer sites with content and information over simply an online store.
  
• Options. What do your customers want to, or have to know about your products before they purchase? If you are selling jewellery such as rings, the ring size is important information. Do your products come in different colors? Different sizes? How many options does the Cart allow per product?
  
• Search. Browsers are going to want to search your products, so a basic search is absolutely necessary. After the basic search, you may want to incorporate other more specialized searches. Visitors may want to search for all products under $25, or for all products in a particular size or color for example.
  

Most of these are functionalities may already be included in the Shopping Cart your web development company suggests, and if not, they are easily added either through custom programming, or through plug-in modules.



About the Author:
Shakir Husein is the CEO of Dynamic Intel Dynamic specializes in secured ecommerce solutions and content management systems. More articles on ecommerce and CMS can be accessed at Pacific Articles.