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.