A: With more than a hundred e-commerce shopping carts to choose from, selecting one is really a matter of preference with careful product evaluation. But what makes one provider stand out from the rest?

Features

Different shopping cart providers offer similar and unique features that are useful to the consumers and beneficial for you as a merchant. While choosing which features to have may depend on the size of your business, a good shopping cart provider offer a wide range of feature options for different business needs.

Integrated Online Marketing and Promotional Tools

With a right shopping cart, you can increase traffic and increase sales virtually over night. How? Shopping carts affect the costumer’s response to your website. The more useful tools it has, the more it can attract new costumers and persuade existing costumers to buy your products. Through integrated marketing and promotional tools like catalog and product comparison, your costumers are able to make easy and wise decision on which products to buy.

Promos, sale, discounts, free shipping and coupons are powerful marketing strategies that can attract more costumers. Shopping carts offer these features.

Product review is another powerful feature that can increase sales. In a study conducted by CompUSA and iPerceptions, 63% of costumers are more likely to buy for the sites with product ratings and reviews.

User-friendly Interface/Ease of Use

Costumers are very impatient when it comes to purchasing products and services online. The last thing your costumers want to you is figure out how to navigate your shopping cart. A user-friendly website is important to keep potential costumers browsing. A user-friendly shopping cart is crucial if you want to keep your costumers stay and complete the transactions.

Payment Options

Different online costumers prefer to use certain types of payment. While most would like credit cards, many are still hesitant to enter personal information online and choose other alternative modes of payment like Paypal, checks and money orders. A good shopping cart service should cover all these.

Hacker-Safe Ordering Page

Earning your costumers’ confidence is important in any business. That is why you have to make sure that your costumers are properly protected when they enter their credit card information to your website. Wise costumers often look for SSL certificate seal on a merchant’s website. This seal is a guarantee that the site is hacker safe. Make sure that you have one.

Full Order Management System

A good shopping cart guides costumers throughout the process of purchasing, checking out, payment and shipping. These services can be provided fully by a hosting company or are linked from different services. Payments can be through major credit cards, PayPal, money orders and checks. Shipping can be linked to major shipping carriers like UPS, DHL and FedEx.

Costumer Service/Support

One of the best ways to gauge if a particular e-commerce shopping cart provider has a good costumer service is by sending questions though their email address. How fast did they reply? Did you get a template reply? In business, time is money; and personal touch is a plus. Costumer service should reply a personalize message as soon as possible. Another way to test how good the costumer service is is through its technical support. In running an effective e-commerce store, the availability of good documentation is important.

A: Setting up an online shop is easy. Marketing the products you sell, while it requires a bit of online skills, can be done. But your job is not finished once you have accomplished these two. You cannot just waiting for traffic and hope that they become potential costumers. You need the right tool that converts traffic in to sales. You need an e-commerce shopping cart. But getting a shopping cart is one thing; maximizing its benefits is another.

While many choose to go online to purchase merchandise, it doesn’t mean that you can get complacent because if they happen to stumble upon your website, they will buy anyway. This is a wrong way of looking at your traffic. You have to please your costumers and please them well. You need to know what they want – not necessarily the things they need to have but the right tools to guide them through the entire online purchasing process. And with tougher competition now, you need to raise the bar and stand out among the rest.

Thus, your online store needs not only to look good, but also to have efficient shopping cart system. Here’s how to maximize your website and shopping cart and convert traffic into buyers:

Use all the tricks in the business. Use large headings and sub-headings to let your costumers know where they are; and breadcrumb navigation to help your costumers know how deep they are on your website.

Use search functions to let costumers find what they are looking for fast and easy, especially if you are holding a large inventory and multi-page site. Place the search function above the fold where costumers can see it.

Give the power to your costumers to narrow down their search options by using search category refinement. Costumers should be able to refine according to size, shape, color etc. Make sure that they can clear this refinement anytime. Utilize sort option that allows your costumer see your product by category.

Let your costumers remove or change items from their cart easily. Help them find product that are related to the items they have chosen. Cross sell!

Place your contact information where costumers can easily see it.

Never allow your costumers to go on a lengthy process of shopping, only to find out that the products they have chosen are out of stock. Show only the products that are on stock or place “out of stock” mark on those what are not in your inventory. Most shopping carts have this feature.

Cart abandonment rates are high simply because many shopping cart services do not allow shopping before registration. What you should do is to let your costumers to add items in their cart before they register for an account. Some vendors have this feature.

Show them every detail of the product they wish to buy including the price, discounts (if there’s any), applicable taxes and added fees. Do not hide any information that the costumers should know.

The key to any online store is usability. Many online shoppers get irritated even on the tiniest hitch on your site. This is the main reason why many abandon their cart even on the last step in purchasing product. Keep your costumers fully satisfied by making everything easy. Use your e-commerce shopping cart properly. Extra efforts may require time but the pay offs are all worth the trouble.