Thursday, August 28, 2008

Choosing The Best Shopping Cart For Your Online Business

By Kirt Christensen


It can be a difficult process for many small business owners to select an e-commerce system that allows your website to function seamlessly from both your end as well as that of the consumer. This is especially true for the shopping cart software. If all or most of your business is conducted online, the shopping cart is the factor that can cause your business to succeed or fail as it determines how likely a potential customer will be to complete a purchase.

As many sites utilize a hodge-podge of e-commerce solutions, the average online business may seem to simply add on a shopping cart without giving the process much thought. But the shopping cart software requires a large number of tasks to be completed, and such a mix-and-match approach can leave your system inadequately prepared to handle necessary functions. It is important that you give adequate thought to what the best shopping cart would be for your particular small business.

The most important feature necessary in choosing shopping cart software is that it be able to function well with the current systems your business is using. The shopping cart needs to be able to instantly mesh with inventory management, customer databases and payment systems to successfully complete each sale.

You also need to ask yourself when choosing the best shopping cart for your small business what level of software complexity your customers are likely to have on their own end. You want to provide the greatest degree of simplicity possible to the user, so that customers will not be driven away by a user-unfriendly system.

Another factor will be how much your small business can afford to spend on shopping cart software. While there will be a limit to what you can afford in an e-commerce system, simply going with the cheapest available software is a very poor decision. If this inexpensive software is difficult for the customer to use or is not fully compatible with your other e-commerce tools, it can create serious problems for your business.

Yet another consideration is how the software is built in terms of coding. Whereas once systems that were developed in common programs were typically used, many businesses evolved to use either more expensive but well supported systems or open source systems that are free of charge but lack support. You will need support if you are not technically experienced, and while going with free software may seem the logical choice, it may leave you with problems. Be sure that you pick a shopping cart program that you can either get support for or can fix yourself.

If you're still confused even after considering the above points, you can use the internet to gather the opinions of others who have used certain software packages. Many forums for small business owners post shipping cart software reviews for prospective purchasers to peruse and gather opinions on without needing to test the software. The average shopping cart software review will give the reviewer's take on the above points in many cases, allowing you to quickly gather the facts and compare.

No matter what software package you choose to purchase for your small business web site, the shopping cart must be something that is seen as good on both the consumer and the business end. If you can choose a package that offers ease of use for the consumer, while at the same time offers compatibility with your other small business software, you can simplify the flow of transactions on your website.

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