Shopping cart makes all the difference in Ecommerce

Ecommerce is all about online shopping, with the shopping cart playing the role of a back bone in the whole setup. Yet most ecommerce websites fail to realize this fact and pay not much of attention to this most crucial aspect. Most websites today need to use some kind of a shopping cart irrespective of whether they are selling products or services online. And the task of finding the most ideal shopping cart solution, to be installed on your site, is a challenging one knowing that all your business relies on this back bone. A normal search on any search engine for a shopping cart will return more than ten million results. And no one has the time to go through this entire list. That makes finding the most apt cart even more difficult.

Shopping carts are generally based on software like cold fusion, java, Perl and asp. And the price range for the web hosted shopping carts could vary from five dollars to a few hundred dollars per month, while to buy one for a lifetime would nowhere be less than two thousand dollars. The features available on the cart will vary drastically across different sellers. At the time of purchasing a cart you will need to know your exact requirements in term of the budget you wish to spend and the list of features, which are essential for you business type.

But the overall task may not be so cumbersome with the help provide to you in this article. There are points which you must follow so that you land up taking the right decision about the shopping cart you want to place on your site.

• The price factor: first determine how much do you want to spend on the shopping cart, as also whether you want to take a cart on monthly basis or buy it onetime. Its better to go in for the monthly payment carts as if you are not satisfied you can shift on to some better cart without wasting much of you money. In the monthly options you have a wide choice of shopping carts available which may cost you a few dollars to a few hundred dollars a month. There are even free shopping carts available but the performance of these carts may not be good especially as they take a long time to load up and can be tricky to configure. The monthly payment based shopping carts are good as they can be easily installed and used by anyone who knows very little about programming, and within no real time you could have a mind blowing storefront.

• There are two types of carts available one being the hosting cart solution and the other one being software download shopping cart. When you are stuck between the choices of hosting shopping carts and download software carts your programming skills may have the answer. If you have some skills in the field you can go in for a software download cart, where can download the software, have it installed on your web server and then configure it for use. With the other type the configuration is very easy and the storefront will be in place within few hours. Buying the software could turn out to be more economical as the total amount you pay for a life time use here is equal to around a one year subscription to the online hosting shopping carts.

• One of the most important features with shopping carts is their ability to connect and carry out secure processing of credit card based orders, in as little time as possible. You must ensure that your merchant account is supported by the cart that you install. This aspect should not be a problem as most carts support online payment processing through larger companies like the verisign and authorizenet.

• If you deal in physical products you would need the shopping cart to have a feature for giving the buyer shipping options through various different services priced differently. You may also need features like the ability to track orders and check for order status from within the shopping cart.

• The technical support that accompanies a shopping cart is always a must; it could be in the form of newsletters tutorials of online help. Whatever be the form the facility must be available. When you buy a software cart you may have to buy technical support separately as well, the basis of charging may be on accident basis, a yearly subscription or it may even be free. So you must check for the customer support guarantee that is being offered with the cart.

• Any shopping cart which fails to provide adequate security is a waste of time. The shopping cart should support SSL server with 128bit encryption technology. As the website owner you are responsible to provide safe and secure transfer of sensitive information that is the information related to credit cards and bank accounts. Any leakage of this information could get you into legal trouble.

• The shopping cart needs to be equipped with customization facility, so that you can make it blend well with your website style.

• Other features you may want could be- the ability to offer affiliate programs, integrating Quickbooks, newsletter and other mailing facility, tax options, language translation and currency conversions.

• Most shopping carts have errors like leaving the buyer with no products in the cart at the checkout, time out errors and so on. For this you could visit forums and blogs to see what existing users have to say about the cart, also you may want to contact some of the people whose testimonials are found on the cart sellers website.

• And lastly the thing that could get you a lot of help in this regard is that there are some good directories which enlist tested and good quality carts. You could use their services and then carry out your own evaluation.