How to Pick Shopping Cart Software ——before setting up your online store

How to select shopping cart software? After reading the article, all the worry and anxiety go away. Instead, 5 tips and 16 must-have features help you pick the reliable and powerful shopping cart software.
By: Angela
 
Sept. 7, 2010 - PRLog -- Are you hovering among several shopping cart software, with which you’d like to start your online business? After reading this article, you will get rid of anxiety and worry. Here come the 5 tips and 16 must-have features to evaluate a shopping cart software. Let’s rock!

5 things you should look for in a shopping cart  

1.   Functionality
Comprehensive Functionality available to assist shop owners to do online business: site management, catalog management, product management, customer management, order management, marketing tools.
2.   Performance
Three words - quick, easy and reliable - can simply describe what performance. Basically speaking, a lot of shopping cart software requires a period of learning time before one can fully control over it. However, performance determines how long it takes.
3.   Capacity
How many products can your shopping cart handle? It should be determined by the scale of your online shop. Of course, the shopping cart with unlimited products is the best.
4.   Payment Gateway Compatibility
Some popular payment gateways should be included in the shopping cart. By the way, the security of the payment gateway should be attached the most importance to.
5.   Support
Check out the forums for general ambience and response times.

16 Must-Have Features of Shopping Cart

1.   Search-engine Friendliness
It simply refers to title tags, meta descriptions and keywords.
2.   PCI Compliant Hosting & Security
Maybe you should find a provider who can host your website in a PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliant environment.
3.   Solid Analytics & Reporting
It’s fantastic that the shopping cart software integrates with Google Analytics to demonstrate real-time site and search ranking data and that offers a variety of other product performance reporting capabilities.
4.   Integrated payment gateway
I’m sure if customers can’t find the payment gateway they look for, they will leave away without turning around.
5.   Product Review Feature
In fact, research shows that even bad reviews help to sell more product than not showing reviews for a product at all. You can always review the posts before you choose to display them or choose to display reviews automatically on the website.
6.   Flexible Pricing Management
Promotional pricing for any product, customer, order, or time frame, wholesale or retail pricing, affiliate pricing, accepts coupon codes, allows for quantity-based pricing and has tax-exempt.
7.   Robust Catalog Management
A bulk import/export of your catalog, product cloning to simplify catalog additions, automatic resizing of your product images, and some strong inventory management capabilities such as letting you set minimum quantities and identify backordered items.
8.   Product Feed Support
Easily create a feed of your products that you can then upload to shopping comparison sites and that will allow you to create multiple product feeds for each comparison engine.
9.   Copy of transaction
Allow customers to check it out anytime and anywhere
10.   Auto responder and newsletter functions
This functionality will save a lot of trouble and repetitive work for you.
11.   Integrated Shipping
Integrate with the major shipping providers such as USPS, UPS and FedEx and you’ll want the ability to markup shipping rate-quotes by a percentage or by a flat amount so that you have the option to charge transparent handling fees.
12.   Up-selling & Cross-selling Features
They are the most common marketing tools
13.   Zoom image
Allows visitors to zoom and look at different angles of the product.
14.   Gift Certificate/Wishlist Features
64 percent of those surveyed said gift certificates equaled 25 percent of their online purchases and half of those surveyed said they shopped using someone else's wishlist.
15.   RSS feeds capable
Allows customers to keep track of the latest news of the online shop
16.   Affiliate modules
Earn extra money for your online shops

The items above are helpful to shopping cart software picking. If you want to know more information about ecommerce tips, please visit http://www.tomatocart.com.

# # #

Wuxi Elootec Technology Co., Ltd is a professional development and consulting company of open source web solution. Elootec dedicates the development and consulting services of:
* TomatoCart
* Open source shopping cart solutions
* CMS
* RIAs/ AJAX
End
Wuxi Elootec Technology Co., Ltd PRs
Trending News
Most Viewed
Top Daily News



Like PRLog?
9K2K1K
Click to Share