Important Tips to Select a Shopping Cart for your Online Store

When we Google for shopping carts, we find a lot of open-source, paid ones, hosted solutions and premium ones. It always a tough question to answer which one is better and which shopping cart suits my online store.


Here are few tips which can help you to judge the right shopping cart be it hosted solution or an integrated product -

1. The shopping cart should gel well with the design and structure of your website. Customers should not feel that they are on to different page. These will avoid your customers getting surprises and they becoming too careful.
2. If you are using a hosted solution or a 3rd party shopping cart then, make sure they share the customer contact details with you as well. This will avoid your customers to enter their contact details twice.
3. Make sure the product pages generated by the shopping cart are search engine friendly means, the pages are easily indexed by search engines. More over, you are able to enter the product description with your main keywords and search engine robots are able to read it. If not, you may have to spend more on PPC or paid advertisements to promote. Search engines are the major source of targeted traffic to any website or online store.
4. Also, ensure the url of product pages generated by the shopping cart are search engine friendly with no special characters in them.
5. You can also see if it generates / updates the RSS file when new products are added. This will avoid your task to update the RSS as well, when ever you add new products.
6. Check the buying process or the checkout process. The number of steps involved or pages involved should be as less as possible. Try to avoid duplication of process. The steps should be clearly indicated as a flowchart to the customer to show it as an progress indicator.
7. Also check the shipping cost is provided very early in the process. This will reduce shopping cart abandons.
8. You need to have flexibility in providing ‘discounts’ and ‘free shipping’ options to certain products or categories. If you can specify the time period for these discounts then it is an added advantage. And, if there is also an option with such discounts to certain geographical area then, you have much more advantageous. You can select ‘free shipping’ as per the country or city.
9. Customers always want to compare products. Shopping cart should be able to provide info of similar products.
10. Check if the shopping cart has an option to help you in cross-sell and up-sell products. This can really help you in increasing the volumes.
11. If you have a subscription based products or your customers have to pay at regular intervals then, make sure the shopping cart has these options to set the interval and it should trigger an email as an reminder to the customer.
12. Support info and contact details should be clearly mentioned on all the pages.
13. Integrated email marketing program will be an added advantage. You do not have to rely on other email campaign programs and keep moving and updating the customer’s contact details. Plus, if the system triggers email to subscribers about new product addition, in-stock or discount alerts… then it is an added advantage.
14. The system should be able to provide the required reports regarding the sales, traffic..etc.
15. Last but not least, ability to scale up the system to be compatible with mobile phones and link them up with apps so that purchases can be done on phones as well. It should also have ability to send messages to the phones if possible.

If the shopping cart provides these few important features then it will surely reduce the shopping cart abandons. Happy Selling!!

Also read: Top 10 Automated Email Programs to Increase Online Sales