When it comes to online sales, getting your product into your customer’s hands is critical. Making the sale is meaningless if it too difficult for your customer to actually buy from you. Comprehensive shopping cart software will make it easy for the customer to buy from you, and will make it easy for you to track and manage your sales, without a lot of wasted time on your part.
What is a shopping cart?
Shopping cart software is the place where the sale gets made. It is the interface between the products or services you offer and putting their money in your bank.
To get a good idea of what a full-service, all-in-one shopping cart has to offer, take a look at 1shoppingcart.com.
The shopping cart you choose must be able to do three basic things for you: track the products chosen by your customer, tally the total cost of those items, and process the payment into your merchant account. A more advanced shopping cart may also manage inventory, calculate shipping costs, provide digital downloads, track your affiliate marketing programs, and even offer email marketing services for you. If you offer more than one product or service on your website, you need a shopping cart.
The best thing about using a shopping cart for your online sales is that it will handle a variety of functions for you – automatically…Boom, Done.
Which shopping cart should I choose?
There are three basic criteria to consider when choosing a shopping cart for online sales: price, functions, simplicity.
Price – The price of shopping cart software ranges from FREE to “SERIOUSLY”? In fact, if you’ve built your website on WordPress, there are quite a few free shopping cart plug-ins available. For example, check out WP e-Commerce. Also, be aware that some shopping carts can be purchased with a one-time fee, while some will entail a monthly cost, and others will have a per-transaction fee. All of these need to be considered. To explore more shopping cart plug-ins for your WordPress site, go here.
Functions – What are you selling? If you’re selling actual, hold-it-in-your-hand product, you don’t need an electronic download capability, do you? If you are selling eBooks, you don’t need a shipping cost calculator. The nature of the products or services you are offering will determine, to a very large extent, just what type of functionality you will need from the shopping cart you choose. A good place to compare shopping features is, appropriately enough, CartCompare.com.
Simplicity – Just how computer savvy are you? If you’re a total techno-klutz, your shopping cart should be very simple and easy to use. If you’re a total techno-nerd though, you may want a shopping cart to have a bazillion features for you to play with. Your level of skill on your computer should determine just how full-function or minimalistic you want your shopping cart to be. To see a graphic comparison of the top ten shopping carts, go to TopTenReviews.com.
We’ve now made it to the fourth step of the online sales process, and we’re still plugging along, trying to help you get a handle on 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…