When you make an online sale, your shopping cart is how you get your products into your customer’s hands, or heads, or smarty-phone-computing-machine-thingy. This is how you put it where they will use it.
The shopping cart on your website is the place to organize your products for sale, and to provide the interface so they can “click to buy.” It is very much like the shopping cart you push around the grocery store (you know, the one with the wiggly wheel that always veers to the left?). In essence, the shopping cart provides a way for your products to get from the display shelf – your website – to the cash register – your merchant account.
Let the shopping cart do the work for you
The best shopping carts are fully automated, handling much of the grunt work and details for you when you make that online sale. Just like the cashier in the grocery store (you know, the one who never smiles?), your shopping cart will sort, price, and total the sale for your customer in the blink of an eye.
Your shopping cart will allow your customer to…
- Select multiple products
- Choose various sizes or applications
- Offer, accept, and apply coupons or discounts
- Bill your customer on a recurring basis, as for ongoing services (group programs / payment options here!)
- Track and implement delayed billing, as for a free trial period
- Secure, track, and limit electronic downloads
But of course, it ain’t that simple, right?
There are shopping cart products which do even more than this for you; they can offer an all-in-one option, combining your shopping functions with email marketing in a super-slick package of services. This is a HUGE time saver for the online marketer. To have both your shopping cart and email marketing program, including follow-up and follow-through handled by the same system is a monster time saver.
Some of the best shopping carts are…
Shopping cart only:
Shopify.com <—- This one is pretty.
All-in-one shopping carts:
1shopping cart.com <—- Our fav!
infusionsoft.com <—- Seriously…this is hard-core stuff. Don’t attempt this on your own.
And then, just to complicate things a bit… of course, there is PayPal, where you get invoicing and shopping cart services as well. Be careful though, the PayPal cart is not nearly as versatile as these other shopping carts can be. (Although…good news about PayPal! 1ShoppingCart and PayPal just joined forces so that you can now do reoccuring payments with PayPal when you use 1SC – Woo freakin’ hoo!)
We’ve made it to the third step of the online sales process here, and we’re moving forward with trying to help you understand it. We will follow up on this post with more great info on how to manage your online sales in our next few posts. Stay tuned…