About Shopping Carts

When I first thought about creating this page, I thought it would be easy to write about shopping carts and maybe even do a review of them but some research on the Internet  proved otherwise.  I am sure for the the un-initiated that selecting the right shopping cart software must be like throwing a dart blindfolded. They all claim to be secure, they all can process orders and they all promise they are the very best. To do a complete review of all the software would require downloading and installing hundreds of different products.  That is just not feasible for me to do at this time. What I do want to present then,  are features that should be included in your cart and some of the key issues that you need to address with a shopping cart and finally some resources. I envision that the material on this page will be an on-going work in progress, since the world of ecommerce is constantly changing.

Easy to setup Ecommerce - no knowledge needed

Putting the Customer first - some key ingredients

The shopping cart and your pages that lead to products should have a compelling design with easy navigation to individual products, categories of products, search functions, checkout buttons, order history, shipment tracking, and customer account management.  Make sure your web site incorporates "sticky" elements. Fast loading images (thumbnails) that are professional in appearance and relevant to the product. Choose a coordinated color scheme and theme for your site (Tip look at the leaders in your industry and study closely what they have done). Even though it is ecommerce, content is still the king. Include links to detailed information, privacy policies, returns, security and anything else that relates to your business and its products.

Additional things to consider are:

Provide a running cart total
Provide a customer address book
Real time credit card & Echeck processing
Personalization (Welcome back Mr./Mrs customer) 
Easy login for returning customers
Forgotten password retrieval
Automated form fill out for existing customers
Spelling & Grammar (so important)
 

Purchase history reporting
Provide Wish lists
Gift Certificates
Multiple shipping addresses
Online shipping charges (interfaced to couriers)
Gift wrap options
Ecoupons
Currency Conversion
Adaptability to other languages.

For the vast majority of online ecommerce sites, your goal should go beyond simply getting a sale, it should include building a customer relationship.

Key Features for the Merchant / Marketer / Developer

Why are shopping carts abandoned (by the prospect)?

Here are some of the reasons from one study I was able to find.  (greatest to least)

Who is in control of the transaction?

Some shopping cart software passes the customer over to the developer's server  to implement the storage of items in the cart, checkout process and finally payment processing. I am not in favour of these systems, because the developer has complete control of your customer and their credit information.  Generally it is these carts that claim to be super easy to install since basically all you are doing on your site is linking to them. In this situation, you have no control over your customer's information or the security or reliability of the process.

The more sophisticated shopping cart systems that incorporate many of the features we have been talking about on this page include the ability to interface (connect) to a payment processor. The payment processor only gets part of the information, for example customer name, address, total amount and credit card number /expiry. This information is then securely transmitted to the banking system that the payment processor is connected with.  Funds are then transferred to your merchant account.  The banking system mandates that the payment processor have a truly secure system.  Some payment processors use their merchant accounts with the credit card companies and then pay you less holdbacks and usage fees, others will use your own Internet merchant account and charge system usage fees. 

Another method of processing, is to hold the credit card information in the shopping cart database for merchant retrieval and subsequent manual input to an onsite terminal.  In this scenario, it is vital that the information stored in the database is 100% secure and is not accumulated (the more credit card numbers stored the sweeter the target for the intruder).

Ecommerce Resources