Starting an online store can be a daunting task. You have to figure out how to present your products, manage content and product changes, accept payments, offer incentives and reach your market. There are many pitfalls when choosing a shopping cart system, but we’re going to help you pick the right tool for the job.
Do your homework
All of your products will likely need pictures, descriptions, pricing and search terms. After you meet with a prospective web development company, ask how you can import in your initial products. Plan on doing this initial data entry on your own or be prepared to pay extra for it, web designers are more expensive than data entry employees or find a nice or nephew that wants to make some extra money. Leverage web designers to help import the initial products you plan to launch your site with. Keep in mind you may have product information already in your accounting software that you can export to get you started.
Accepting Credit Cards
This could be a topic all on its own so I’ll keep it brief. There are many, many options; one great new way to accept money online is by using Google checkout. Much like PayPal this system charges a percentage and handles the security of the online checkout for you, its much cheaper than PayPal though with a discount rate of just 2%. If you already have a merchant account there’s probably a way to link this account to your website, ask your web designer how.
It’s important that the shopping cart software you choose be able to take payments through the system you plan to use. Ask this question before you buy!
Search Engines
Not all shopping carts are made equal in fact many fall short when it comes to search engine optimization. Search engines are extremely important to getting customers to your site, make sure your sites addresses (URLs) are easy to read, they should make sense to a human as well.
A bad URL looks like this:
https://order.store.yahoo.com/cgi-bin/wg-order?unique=e80b9&catalog=modernrock&et=45be87c1&basket=b%3D5C3a42bfd100f49245be80b9562fe3b42bfd148a65140f9b2ff8878e9a7df0b38%26l%3D%26s%3DANxxj8Yc4LHytMJ8Ej3GBBwVh7Q-
It’s very long, doesn’t make sense and has one or more of the following characters in it “?”, “=”, “&”. Avoid shopping carts that have URLs like this. Before choosing a shopping cart, ask to see a sample of an existing customer’s site using the cart you’re being recommended and make sure the URLs look similar to this:
http://awinestore.com/Abeja-2005-Cabernet-Sauvignon-p-23444.html
The above sample site was built using X-Cart and has web addresses that are more meaningful and easy to read. Oddly enough these easier to read addresses are better for the search engines as well. Your site will get higher ratings the more descriptive and easy to read your web sites addresses are. You should be able to figure out what the product is by reading the URL. Many shopping carts have optional components that enable these search engine friendly URLs.
Make sure the shopping cart you pick has the ability to add search phrases, often referred to as meta tags. Although your titles and descriptions are more important, many search engines give you better ratings if you include meta tags on each of your product pages.
Discounting and Coupons
The ability to have sales, give out coupon codes and or reduced shipping rates is all determined by the shopping cart software and its capacity to handle this. Be sure you know the types of promotions or sales you want to run and make sure the shopping cart you’re looking at can support it. I would ask your web designer to find out how hard it is to put products on sale and take them off again, you do not want to be stuck with a system that requires the web designer to initiate the beginning and ending of sales.
Administration and Training
Some carts have very few options and are easy to learn, others let you take control of every aspect of the cart and are harder to pick up. Be sure your web designer includes at least 4 hours of training with any shopping cart package you choose, more complex packages will take more training.
Be sure the shopping cart you choose is right for you. Remember this is a large investment in time, not just money, make sure and get this right the first time. It’s a lot of work to switch shopping carts, keep the features you want now and in the future in mind when picking a shopping cart.
