Shopping cart basics

Revision date: Dec 14, 2005

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Choice criteria

Overall costs

Would it be of much expense to get a working shopping cart software? Of course, there is some range of open source products with the most up-to-date features and distributed absolutely free. But the problem with these "free" shopping carts is that they may require up to several days of setup and not too intuitive in maintenance and configuration.

Hosted or distributed solution?

There are two general choices you should consider while looking for the overall shopping cart solution. The first option is to purchase the cart script, download it and perform the setup and configuration process on your own. The second one is renting an online storefront (a hosted solution) with a very short installation period and a plain and simple configuration. The thing worth noticing with purchasing the script and making it work on your own is that there's only a single, one-time payment for the registration which is valid for a lifetime, so if you or some of your team has some basic programming skills this solution seems to be preferable. The same price usually has to be paid for a one-year hosted solution.

Supported payment gateways

To accept credit card payments and enable the real-time order processing it's necessary to obtain a payment gateway account. There are various details and many options described in our article "Choosing a payment gateway". Now let's only mention the fact that not all existing shopping cart software provides you with equal possibilities. Please make sure the merchant account you are going to obtain (or already have) is compatible with the selected cart. Most carts support the largest billing companies like PayPal, WorldPay, Authorize.Net, 2Checkout and some others. As for X-Cart and LiteCommerce, there's actually no trouble with that as these products support the wide range of payment processors. The complete list of supported gateways is available for reference, and the recommended gateways list will make it easier to find a decent billing company for those who is still searching for the high-quality payment service.

Shipping

If you're going to sell physical goods, it would be a good idea to obtain a shopping cart with built-in real-time shipping cost calculation services. This way the site owner is able to define the formulas depending on which the total shipping expenses will be counted and provided to the customer during the checkout process.

Some shopping carts are also compatible with electronic goods such as software files, music, images and documents. To sell a product you should upload the file onto the server and associate a product with this file. When your customer buys an electronically distributed product he will receive an email with the download link and download key.

Support

There are various support programs offered by various companies. In the world of e-commerce solutions technical support is usually granted on a pay-per-incident basis, but a yearly or a monthly support fee is also common. Free support for this kind of products is a rare case and not always as efficient as desired.

The pay-per-incident system has a substantial advantage over periodical support service. It allows adequately assessing the technical assistance. Moreover, since the points do not expire through time and reasonably low prices are offered it gives you an opportunity to allocate resources (money or support points balance) to get technical support anytime.

Security

The most basic feature necessary to be supported in any shopping cart is SSL (secure socket layer) with 128-bit encryption. As you have a responsibility for the storage and transfer of secure private information of your customers (credit card number, bank account etc), be sure to find out about the security technologies used in the functionality of the shopping cart you've chosen and contact the support department if necessary.

Style

Imagine if all the stores (including yours) looked similar to each other. As that wouldn't do you any good, it seems reasonable to choose a cart with the customizable (preferably template-based) layout. This way you may be sure that every aspect of your store's appearance may be suited to your design and style needs and you're able to look believable. One of the most important things to do if you already have a website is to fit both layouts of a corporate site and a storefront to each other (to make a seamless transition for your customers).

Extras

Finally, let's take a look at some of the other features which might be worth considering while looking for the shopping cart that suits all of your needs.

Affiliate program: brings advantages of "Affiliate marketing" to the promotion campaign of your store so your partners can promote your goods on their websites and get commissions.

Integration with Quickbooks: some shopping carts allow direct integration with Quickbooks. This popular financial software helps simplify everyday office tasks and lets you focus on serving customers in your business.

Newsletters: the ability to maintain your own direct e-mail lists to help your customers stay in touch with the current updates and the latest news of your business.

Taxing: create taxable or tax-free products and have the ability to add various global tax options at checkout.

World Languages & Currencies: Language translation for the contents and the interface. Support for world currency might be necessary especially if you're planning to sell worldwide.

Reliability

Not all shopping carts are stable. A private UK-based web testing firm found the following, after studying a large group of UK online shopping carts for a period of one month (24/7): "The majority of UK web sites are guilty of leaving e-consumers stranded at the checkout empty handed, once they have already spent valuable time browsing and selecting goods to purchase. This is due to erratic functionality within shopping carts, at a critical step in the online purchasing process.

E-consumers are prevented from making purchases on UK web sites for 9 hours and 30 minutes a month on average, (115 hours a year)." "80 per cent of web sites perform inconsistently with widely varying response times, timeouts and errors - leaving consumers at best wondering what to do next and at worst unable to complete their purchase successfully. This is potentially costing e-retailers millions in lost sales from consumer frustrations."

Please try to find out what others have to say about a shopping cart that you are interested in. Serious errors could cost you thousands of dollars in sales. Get a stable and secure cart.