E-commerce

E-commerce: How to Select the Best Shopping Cart

By Doug Williams - May 2006

In the US, the number of people accessing the Internet is estimated at 210.8 million (2006) which means 72% of the population is online. Of those using the Internet, almost 80% will purchase products and service online this year. Each will spend an average of $784 annually. Online sales have increased at a rate in excess of 22% every single year since 1999.

With this fast growth, more and more companies are turning to selling online. Using e-commerce websites, customers can shop and purchase at their convenience. With rising gasoline prices, these trends are expected to continue at increasing rates.

The key component of any ecommerce site is the shopping cart. With literally hundreds of possible carts to choose from, how is a web store owner supposed to choose? Here are guidelines you should follow in choosing which cart will be best for your online business.

Selection

1. Determine what is important to you
2. Which are Search engine friendly?
3. Look at the Annual Cost to operate the shopping cart
4. Choose the Management Tools that you need
5. Choose your Payment and Shipping methods
6. Go to and try actual stores using each cart.
7. Research reviews on your final choices

What is Important?

Before you decide which cart, you need to consider what things are important to how you will run your store. If you only have one or two products, then you may not even need a shopping cart. If you have many variations of the same product, an order wizard may be best. These are best created by your local web developer.

Where will your customers come from and how will they find you? If you expect traffic from the search engines, choose a cart that is SEO (search engine optimization) compatible.

If you sell strictly services, then shipping is not important. How will you accept payment… credit cards, checks or gift cards? Will you offer discount coupons? Do you need a Froogle feed? There are many options.

Search Engine Friendly

To get most of you sales as a result of being found in the search results, then expect to invest in search engine optimization and certainly choose a shopping cart that is search engine friendly.

This means can the search engine crawlers (spiders) easily parse and index all areas of your shopping cart? Check some websites using this shopping cart and make sure they have valid error free HTML code. You can check this using: http://validator.w3.org.

Does the shopping cart allow keywords to be used in Title tags, ALT Tags and in product captions? Are their links and sitemaps so that the search engines are never more than two steps from any page? Stay away from shopping carts that generate long query strings or at least choose carts that have the ability to turn this off. Navigation should be easy for search engines to crawl and page names should be short and make use of keywords.

You can list you’re the products and their prices to come up on Froogle (Google) searches. This is a free service; you just need to regularly (at least monthly) update Froogle with a data feed from your shopping cart. If your shopping cart does not support Froogle, there are still other ways of uploading your information, but this takes extra effort.

How much will it really Cost?

You have a number of options in selecting a shopping cart.

1. You can use a “hosted ecommerce solution” which is really a service. Frequently there will be a set-up fee, monthly fee and sometimes a commission on your sales.
2. You can purchase a cart and pay a software licensing fee and sometimes an annual fee for support and updates.
3. You can use an “Open Source” cart such as Zen Cart or OsCommerce which are free but require some technical expertise to configure and set-up.

Store Management

Look at how easy it is to add and update products, including uploading photos and setting up departments or categories. Can you add discount coupons for special promotional discounts? Is inventory management important? If so, can you automatically update inventory levels from your retail store’s inventory system? How are backorders handled? Some will allow easy updating of orders into QuickBooks. Other key areas to look at include visitor and buyer statistics and customer order history.

Payment and Shipping

For credit cards most carts will work with either your own merchant account or with services such as Paypal and 2checkout.com. But also look at how your shopping cart will handle checks, e-checks, phone orders, COD, gift certificates and currency conversions.

Shipping can range from a flat fee shipping to real time shipping calculations based on current USPS, UPS and Fedex tables. Look at how tax calculations and reporting work. How handling fees can be added and can shipments be made from multiple warehouses if you have regional locations.

What we use

We use Zen Cart on most of our e-commerce websites. This is a powerful shopping cart that allows for an unlimited number of products. Zen Cart offers some SEO features that are extremely effective such as adding product names to page META titles. Products, pricing, shipping, newsletters, sales and more are managed through the administration area. There is a wide range of payment gateways available for Zen Cart. Only a few are installed by default, but many more are available for download. Shipping by weight, by number of products, flat rate, etc, are all easily supported. There are a tremendous number of modules that can be found and added. We especially like it because our programmers can easily modify and customize the code for a particular store’s requirements.

Conclusion

With the high growth happening with online sales, all businesses should be considering how to tap into this growing market. With hundreds of shopping carts available, the business manager must first look inward at how they want to manage their online business and then select the cart that best fits their needs.