Online Shopping Cart Systems

Many accomplished professional speakers agree that you can make more money selling your knowledge and experience in the form of products such as ebooks than you can at speaking events. You can use traditional methods to sell products such as direct mail, catalogs and advertising.

However, if you have an established online presence, the whole world is your marketplace at a fraction of the cost of most traditional methods. To easily sell your products on the worldwide marketplace, you will need a stable and effective shopping cart system.

Choosing a shopping cart system for your store is perhaps the most important single decision you’ll make in your online marketing career. Once you select a solution and invest your time in building it, it can be very expensive to change later and you could potentially lose sales by not making the most out of every visitor.

There are literally hundreds of off-the-shelf, free and alternative products out there vying for your money, time or both. And many of them are useless. Making a few key decisions right off the bat will save you a lot of money, time & frustration.

When I first decided to start an online store, I struggled to find a decent shopping cart system, so I took one that was highly recommended by my ISP.  Later I discovered they only recommended that one as they made the most money from it. They didn’t care if it was the best one for me or not. What a hassle! The system wouldn’t do anything but take the order, but you had to have a PhD in computer science to work on it. I found it very inflexible to customise the pages, product categories and product descriptions.  I had spent so much time building it, only to find that it really did not suit my needs at all.

Below are 22 questions you simply must ask anyone trying to sell you a shopping cart. If you don’t hear positive answers to most of the questions, put your wallet back into your pocket and move on to a different solution. Whatever you do, don’t get stuck with a crappy shopping cart, even if you get it for free. If you have a poor shopping cart already, get rid of it. I know that is not what you wish to hear, but you are better choosing a new one, and because you already have a better idea of what your needs are, you are better off starting from scratch.  As have probably spent lots of time and money getting it up and running, but a bad one will cost you many thousands of dollars by waiting to replace it later.

Oh, and one more thing: if you hear the shopping cart developer or owner answer one of the questions below by saying, “Well, we could make it do that,” run away even faster, because you’re going to get stuck with a big custom programming bill with no guarantees that the cart is going to work the way you expected. Read every question below, ensure that it is something that applies to your intentions and ask it of every shopping cart system you are evaluating.

1. Does it calculate shipping and tax?

2. Can it perform specialized shipping like FedEx and UPS?

3. Will it automatically deliver physical products like books and digital goods (e- books and other digital products) in the same transaction?

4. Does it offer customizable “Return to Shopping” pages without requiring custom programming?

This is important so you can send your customers to the most likely product they will buy next. You may have seen that online stores such as Amazon do this.. “People who bought this, also bought…” pages.  Standard carts just send customers back to the main catalog, which forces them to search again for similar products. This is both irritating for your shopper and time-consuming. Any delays in finding what they want could mean a lost sale, when they finally throw their hands up in disgust and move on to your competitor’s site.

5. Does it offer customizable “Thank You” pages based on what the customer just bought?

Savvy marketers put affiliate links and other offers specifically related to the customer’s interests. When a someone clicks on one of these links and purchases a product from someone else, you get a commission.

6. Does it deliver receipt and confirmation e-mails automatically?

The customer wants to know immediately that the order was successfully processed. If your shopper is unsure, you are going to have to answer tonnes of questions -  e-mails and phone calls letting the customer know everything is OK. A simple thankyou page & follow-up email puts your customers at ease.

7. Does it allow multiple order and drop-ship e-mails?

If you are looking into being a drop-ship merchant, in many cases, several different people in (and outside of) need notice of an order. Naturally you do not want to do this manually, automation is the key.

8. Does it have a Web-based administration page?

If not, you’ll be tied into being on a specific computer, the best thing about working online is flexibility.  You want to be able to make changes to your store from anywhere & any computer with a web browser.

9. Does it utilize encryption technology and a secure server?

Some companies make a very healthy profit by luring you in with a cheap or free cart and then make money on selling you an expensive secure server.

10. Can you easily export / import accounting data?

You want to be able to import and export data easily between the cart and your chosen financial applications that need to share the customer and sales data.

11. Does it have its own associate/affiliate program?

Or at least compatible with other leading brands of associate software?
An affiliate program enables other people promote and sell your products on their Web sites. You simply pay them a commission on any sales generated. With my first shopping cart, I tried to get an associate/affiliate program to work, it cost me six months of down time and tonnes of money lost because it wouldn’t work. The associate program people blamed the shopping cart support staff and vice versa. In the end, not long before I dumped the crappy software, I was left holding the bag.

12. Does it have integrated up-sell modules?

The ability to offer similar products to customers making a purchase makes me a small fortune each & every month. We call it, “Do you want fries with that?” If you don’t have this ability, you are leaving thousands of dollars on the table from people who would have spent more if your cart just offered them a similar or related product.

13. Does it have an integrated sales and prospect database?

In the old days I would have to print out orders and then retype them into an Access database. A good shopping cart will have this functionality inbuilt to save errors and gives you instant access to your sales reports and clients.

14. Does it have email broadcast capability?

Quality shopping cart systems are able to read your customer database instantly and send e-mails to any segment or sub-segment of your clients and handle unlimited e-mail magazines or ‘Zines’. Again, in the old days I would have to be genius enough to pick out parts of the database, export them to a file, import them into a mail program and then an hour later actually send the e-mail! Now this is all done in a matter of seconds, they way it should be!

15. Does it have mail merge capability?

The e-mails sent should be personalized to the recipients in many number of ways. You should be able to pop their names in to the subject line and in various portions of the body of the e-mail. You can merge “what they bought,” “when they bought,” “where they live” or just about anything to personlize the email so they feel like it was written just for them. Basically all marketing studies show that mail merge gets a much higher response than plain broadcast e-mail.

16. Can it handle coupons and other discounts?

You can make a deal with John Citizen that everyone coming from his website gets an automatic discount, either a percentage or dollar amount. This makes Joe look great to his visitors and generates more sales for you. Here’s a secret: Joe is your affiliate and makes money on the sale, so he has a fantastic incentive to keep your discounts and coupons in front of his visitors. Effective shopping carts can automate all of this and also handle any quantity discounts you offer.

17. Can it work for multiple Websites with no extra fees?

When I first started I had to get a separate and fairly expensive license for each site and a separate merchant account as well. Not only was this a great deal of expense for each of my ventures, but the hassle with installation every time you wanted a new site to go up was huge. Modern carts can sell cars on one site and lingerie on another and no one knows the difference. The carts run on their own servers so there is no expensive installation each time and set-up is almost immediate.

18. Does it have unlimited and fully integrated “sequential” auto-responders?

Your email list is one of your most important assets.  The auto-responder is how you maintain contact with your customers. This feature follows up automatically over and over again to your clients and prospects to provide them customer on sell other products and services. You may even wish to provide free or paid e-mail courses, and each part of the course is delivered automatically.

19. Does it have ad tracking associated with actual sales?

Simple ad tracking can be used all over the internet, but it is pretty much useless unless corresponds with actual sales. This is called the “conversion ratio.” Your shopping cart system should be able to tell you how many people clicked on a particular promotion or ad (and which ad source) and how many products people purchased. This is the only way you can determine if an ad paid makes a good return or not. Good carts can also automatically split test one of your sales pages against another and tell you which page sells more. You keep the page that sells more, then copy it to a new one & make changes to the page and see if you can convert more visitors.

20. Does it have a pop-up box builder?

Even though many people hate popup windows, they do work. I use them constantly to make all kinds of offers, and I have the sales data to prove they get more money out of the same number of people. If you know how to use them correctly your visitors won’t mind them at all.

21. Does it have a printable off-line order form?

Even today, many people are still afraid to put their credit card information into a website. I still get lots of fax and phone orders. If you want to maximize your sales, your cart must take these kinds of orders as well.

22. Does it come with free training?

You will probably require at least some training in both the basic set up of using your shopping cart, so that you maximize the amount of revenue gained from each customer.

Even if you don’t quite understand what all the above questions mean right now, let me assure you they are important on your bottom-line profits, not to mention saving all the frustration. If you want to know even more about shopping cart systems, check out our review of the top 3 recommended shopping cart systems.

When you decide to go with osCommerce for your e-commerce site, you can simply take their stock standard layout and insert your information along with some products and voila! You now have a completely functional e-commerce site ready for customers and sales. If you’re like most e-commerce sites however, you’ll want to go a step further than that and customize your online storefront to make it better fit your product or line of products. If you are savvy in both the technical and marketing fields, this will probably be a no-brainer. However, if you are an expert in your product, but not necessarily how to sell your product, this article is for you. It’s filled with tips to help you both design your site and well as market your product.

Cutomize Your Site

1. Change your colors

You can go into your stylesheet.css file (in your catalog root folder) and simply change the colors from the stock layout. It’s amazing what a difference something as simple as a custom color layout can do for your website!

2. Choose a template

If you don’t want to start your website design from scratch, you can use a template that will completely transform your online store, find templates at http://www.oscommercetemplates.net.

3. Change your CSS (Style Sheet)

If you don’t want to change the complete template you might decide to change just one thing on the site. This could be the background, buttons or logo. Whichever option you choose, make sure you do something to make the site your own!

4. Improve your images

Spend some time learning some image editing programs so that you can save your pictures in high quality with the smallest file size so that they both look great and load quickly from the website. With the high speed of the Internet, most people don’t have the patience to wait for slow loading pictures and they could even leave your site rather than wait for the images to load properly.

5. Change the page titles

Make sure that you give each page a descriptive title, this will ensure that when search engines spider your store, they will have the appropriate keywords and this will help searchers to want to click on your site.

6. Would YOU shop at your store?

Customers do not like long drawn out checkouts, and will leave if they see any errors as they brows the store. If you can get the information you need as quickly as possible, ie less than two pages including the confirmation of information page, your site will have an advantage over those sites that draw it out. Check every single page to ensure that there are no errors and everything looks good. The osCommerce forum has recommendations on how to achieve this.

Market Your Products

1. Make your site unique

This is a basic marketing technique and is sometimes referred to as creating a Unique Selling Proposition. Basically, this is a simple statement that tells people what makes your store and your business unique from others, especially those in the same niche. Whether you always offer free shipping or guarantee the lowest prices, your unique selling proposition is what sets you apart from the all the other online stores in your market.

2. Don’t forget to sell your product!

Obtaining visitors to your site and getting them to stay on the site are important, but once they are there you need to actually sell the product. You won’t be there to tell them about the items and they aren’t in a traditional store on the high st to examine the product themselves, so your descriptions need to do this for you and the customer. Be detailed, be specific and be honest. Include who would likely enjoy the product and why they would need it. Reviews of the products (link to them from the product page) will also help greatly. Instead of focusing on the details of the product or service, put some emphasis in the benefits. Like they say in sales: “Sell the sizzle, not the steak”.

3. Be the owner in front of your store

Remember when you knew your butchers name, and he would remember yours? Customers like to know the person behind the store. Make it easy for them. Give your customers a way to contact you. This includes a name, address, email and phone number. If they have no way to get into contact with you, your credibility with the customer drops.

4. Offer more than just the product or service

Don’t be afraid to add articles, tips and information related to your product for customers coming to your site. It will increase your credibility as well as give them reasons to return to your site even if they need any of your products right away. Also, reviews add credibility and content in the eyes of search engines as well.
Keep in contact by sending out a periodic newsletter that gives useful information, announces specials and sales and highlights specific products. With just a few customizations your osCommerce webstore can be a unique site that fits your philosophy, product, requirements and above all, your personality.

Shopping or buying cart software is something, which is used mostly in the e-commerce industry. This software mimics the behavior of a ‘normal’ brick-and-mortar store like Walmart. What does a shopper do when entering Walmart? They pop in, pick up a shopping cart and stroll through the isles for the products required.

With an online shopping cart, rather than browse through the physical isles, you browse the pages and once you see something for purchase the shopper adds it to their cart and at the end through the checkout. This software helps people in making any kind of purchase online. As the shopping concludes, this software calculates the total purchases including the handling & shipping charges along with applicable taxes on the selected products.

An online shopping cart system usually comes with a database having all those details regarding the products and customers. It also has a storefront, which shows all details to the visitor and an administration area, which helps the store supervisor to oversee the store. The store administrator can make necessary changes and adjustments such as adding and deleting products, discounts, categories, payment settlement and so on. As most part of the information is already available in the database, the shopping cart software creates the pages almost instantly.

While looking for online shopping cart solution, there are many things to consider. In fact, a large number of choices that a person finds online may seem very daunting at first. Nevertheless, the process can be made easier by being clear from the start about what is actually needed.

Naturally price is an important factor that you need to bear in mind, while looking for your best suited system. There is a huge difference between what is called a ‘hosted solution’ and buying (or downloading for free) an online shopping cart system.

A hosted solution typically includes everything you need to get your store up and running. Including the website itself, a huge line of products to fill your store, a payment gateway to accept credit cards and to also deposit the profit to the store owner. A monthly fee or flat rate fee is usually what most companies ask to pay for this software. Apart from this, there may be additional installation charges. The prices may vary from $100 per month to $500 for a single-time purchase. However, remember that a higher price always does not necessarily mean higher quality, because other factors may even affect the quality of the software as well.

Start-up costs and cripple a new online business before it even gets off the ground. Fortunately this can be overcome by considering an Open Source solution. Open Source means that developers/programmers from all over the world contribute to the application and is available free to anyone who wants it.

Besides the cost factor, there are several features available and a few of them include different types of payment systems, customization of cart and security features. These features also vary from one program to another, so it is essential to look for a software program which meets your requirements from the beginning to save frustration in the future.

Check out a comparison between the top 3 online shopping cart solutions.

Are you looking to start your own online store? Virtually all new websites need some sort of ecommerce built-in for the purpose of selling goods and services in the online marketplace.  If you are new to the world of online shopping cart systems this information will help you make the right decisions to launch you very own online store.

The first and greatest challenge is to find the right ecommerce  solution for your business. This task can be very overwhelming, for example, if you type ‘online shopping cart’ into Google this search alone returns over 55.4 million results! Most of us simply don’t have the time to sort through more than a few pages of a search engine to find what we need.

For the last 3 months, I have devoted much of my time to researching as much  shopping cart technology as I could find. Generally speaking, shopping cart software ranges in price anywhere from free to over $2000 for a single license and hosted carts range from $5 to hundreds of dollars per month. The studied carts cover the spectrum of all web programming languages (PHP,ASP, ASP.NET, Cold Fusion, Flash, Java, JavaScript & Perl shopping carts) and provide limitless features as a whole. The problem is locating the correct cart for you and your business  with specific requirements can be a big task.   Follow the 10 guidelines below and you’ll be on your way in no time at all:

The Top 10 Steps to Finding the Best Online Shopping Cart

Cost

This is the no.1 question on everyone’s mind.  How much money do you have to spend on an online shopping cart?  It’s great to have so many solutions to choose from, but of course this also makes the decision making process more difficult.

The nice advantage is that there are shopping carts available with many features and they are completely free. They are generally open source software.  Keep in mind that just because they are free, does not mean they are any less functional than expensive hosted or ‘off the shelf’ products.

The only problem is that these same “free shopping carts” can take hours of installation time and be fairly difficult to configure.  For a monthly fee, web hosting shopping carts are made for users with little programming experience and allows them to have an online storefront presence in no time.

The cost part of the decision is also very related to the Hosting Vs. Software section (next) as these two questions are important to forming the basis of your online store.
Be clear from the outset, are you willing to pay a monthly fee (anywhere from $10-$100’s per month)?  Should you choose an open source shopping cart which will be easier on your pocket, but will take a investment of your time to learn the system.

Hosting vs. Software

The next item on your agenda should be which route to take with the all-important software that will be the core of your store/business. There are two options in selecting your overall shopping cart solution. Either you download the shopping cart software, install it on your web server, then configure the shopping cart OR you get an online storefront (also known as a hosted shopping cart) where the configuration is very basic and the required setup time is minimal.   The most important points of each are outlined below:

Open Source
•    Free to download and install to your web host
•    Require a merchant system to load products and take credit card payments
•    Costs are domain registration, merchants and web hosting
•    Thousands of templates to choose from (many of them free)

Open source products are very well supported by the users themselves via online forums, it all depends on how much you are willing to pay to launch your online store.  As mentioned above in the Cost section,  you either invest money to save your time, or you invest time to save money.

Hosted
•    Easy configuration and setup with wizards to help you get started
•    Include merchants to load site with products
•    Include payment gateway to accept credit cards
•    Many templates to choose from
•    Costs are monthly/yearly at anywhere between $25-$300 per month, not required, but recommended to buy your own domain

Keep in mind that once you take this route, you are generally ‘locked in’ to this monthly fee, and changing systems from one hosted solution to another, or hosted solution to an open source solution is by all means possible, but will not be simple!

In summary, if you are a DIY kind of person with limited startup funds then an open source solution would be for you.  However if you can support it financially, a hosted solution with everything built in would be for you.

Supported Payment Gateways

What are payment gateways? Gateways give shopping carts the ability to connect and securely process credit card orders in real-time. Not all shopping carts are created equal. When choosing a payment gateway provider, make sure that its supported by the cart system you select. I have found that almost all carts support the larger online payment processing companies, such as Authorize.net, PayPal and VeriSign, but as always double check before choosing.

Shipping Options

Will you be shipping physical products? If so, there are shopping carts that have built-in real-time shipping options through DHL, UPS And USPS.  Many shopping cart systems give the customer the ability to view tracking orders and order status all from within your secure shopping cart web interface. Also, there are shopping carts with options to ship digital products as well (ebooks, files, programs, pictures, music and others).

Technical Support

What kind of technical support does your business require? If you choose to purchase a script, be sure to also subscribe to the shopping cart vendor’s newsletter/forum/email list, so that you can stay on top of future updates to the software. Be aware that technical support is generally available on a pay-per-problem basis, as a yearly fee or in the rare case, free. Be sure to know what kind of customer support guarantee the shopping cart comes with.

Many open source products earn revenue from their free shopping carts by providing support and consultancy, so you always have this option.  However you will find that with each open source cart, there is always a user forum packed with free information and of course if you can’t seem to find the problem you can always place a message on the forum with your question.

Security

Please, only buy a shopping cart if it supports SSL (secure socket layer), with 128-bit encryption. As an online storefront, remember that you are responsible for the safe transfer of sensitive consumer information (credit card and bank account information) that is processed through your online store. If any of the sensitive information is accessible (stolen) from your website, you could be liable. Be sure that you’re purchasing a secure shopping cart solution. Ask the creator’s of the shopping cart what they do specifically to protect the secure transfer of sensitive information.

Style Compatibility

If you wish to add a store to your existing site can you customize your shopping cart to look like your website? There needs to be a seamless transition between your website and your shopping storefront or your customers could become hesitant in purchasing your products if your storefront looks very different to your main website.  There should be similar colors and style layout to look professional and credible.

If you are starting your store from scratch, can the shopping cart software be made to look anyway you wish?  Be sure your system at least allows for templates which you can download (many carts have user-created templates you can download for free).  Never forget that your site should not look like every other store out there, you need to be able to customize your store and create your ‘brand’ look and feel to the site.

Error Free

I hear you ask: “You mean shopping carts can have errors?” As with any software whether web-based or on your computer, there are always bugs.   Don’t be scared by this, the important question you must ask is are these bugs actually going to affect me?  Do they affect the security of my store?
The easiest way is to use Google to search “<name-of-shopping-cart-software> bugs” or “<name-of-shopping-cart-software> security”.  Also many of the cart companies have their own forums so be sure to read as much as you can regarding security and errors which users are talking about and see which one fairs best.  Also generally the longer the company has been around, the more stable their software is. Any shopping cart errors could cost you thousands of dollars in sales, and many frustrated shoppers.  Spend your time wisely and ensure you get a stable and secure cart.

Extra Features

I just wanted to mention some of the other features that I have discovered, which might be a critical point in determining the shopping cart you want.

Newsletter & Mailing Letter Managers – The ability to stay in touch with your current customers and keep them returning to your online store.

Custom Taxing Options – Create taxable or tax-free products and have the ability to add various international tax options at checkout.

World Languages & Currencies – Shopping cart language translation and support for world currency might be a necessary feature for your cart.  Think about your target market and whether you want to ‘go global’ or not.  You can always start locally, within your country. then take your site world wide later.

To Sum Up

Take each of the above steps slowly and your store will have an excellent grounding based on quality decisions.  This is important as the decisions you make now are ones that could affect your online store for years to come!  Read a review of our favorite three ecommerce shopping carts.