Saturday, August 15, 2009

What Makes an E-Commerce Shopping Cart Provider special?

Selecting a shopping cart for your business is a tuff job as there are more than a hundred e-commerce shopping carts in the market. Choosing one from them is really a matter of preference. You have to evaluate the product very carefully. But what makes one provider stand out from the rest? See the answer below.

Features:

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

Integrated Marketing and Promotional Tools

With a right kind of shopping cart, you can increase traffic and sales virtually over night. But how it is possible? Perfect shopping carts affect the customer's response to your website. The more useful tools it has, the more it can attract new customers and influence existing customers to buy your products. Through integrated marketing and promotional tools like catalog and product comparison, your costumers are able to make easy and wise assessment the products they intend to buy.

Promos, sales, discounts, free shipping and coupons are powerful marketing strategies that can attract more traffic to your website and convert a large number of them into customers. A good shopping carts offer all of 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 from the sites which provide product ratings and reviews.

User-friendly Interface/Ease to Use

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

Payment Options

Different online customers prefer to use different types of payment process. While most would like use credit cards, many are still cautious to enter their personal information online and choose alternative modes of payment like Paypal, checks and money orders. A good shopping cart service should cover all of this system.

Hacker-Safe Ordering Page

Earning customerss' confidence is important factor for the success of any business. That is why you have to make sure that your customers are properly protected when they enter their credit card information to your website. Wise and conscious customers 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 customers throughout the process of purchasing, checking out, payment and shipping. These services can be provided fully by a hosting company or can be linked with third party services. Payments can be made 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 measure if a particular e-commerce shopping cart provider has a good customer 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 point. customer service should reply a personalize message as soon as possible and another way to test how good the costumer service is through its technical support. In running an effective e-commerce store, the availability of good documentation is very important.

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