ecommerce 101 Part 3

How to choose the best shopping cart software for your business

Not all shopping cart solutions are the same, and what is best for one business may be an expensive mistake for another.  In part 3 of ecommerce 101 I look at the main factors you need to consider when choosing a shopping cart solution.  No competent web designer will recommend a shopping cart solution to you without understanding your business.  Unfortunately web designers who are competent to analyze your business are a minority so its a case of buyer beware.

Before you choose a shopping cart solution (or worse still allow a computer programmer or graphic artist to choose one for you) you need to understand what you want the software to do for you.  You must start by looking at what you want to sell.

Products sold on the internet fall into 3 general categories.

• Physical products
• Downloadable products
• Services

If you are selling physical products you should think about how many products you have to sell and how you want to group them on your website to make it easy for customers to find what they want. Other considerations are:

• Will your product categories have sub categories?  Not all shopping carts will allow this so decide now.
• Will your products have related products that need to be shown with them?  eg. If you sell iPhones you may want to display covers or other accessories when someone is looking at a phone.
• Do your products have attributes and how many?  An attribute is a colour choice, size choice or other variation of the core product.  Again, many shopping carts don't handle attributes well or even at all.
• Do you need to collect other information when selling the product (wording for a card for example)
• Do you need to track stock quantities by product attribute?
• How is shipping to be calculated and what information needs to be stored with each product such as weight or dimensions?
• Is shipping to be limited to certain countries or different shipping solutions offered in different countries?

All of this information needs to be understood before you even start on the software.  For other types of product consider:

Downloads

• Is the customer paying for a single download or a subscription allowing multiple downloads? How will you control this
• Will the downloads be from your website or an emailed link?
• Do you have an alternative delivery mechanism?

Services

• Is the service on one of purchase, a regular purchase or a subscription?

When you have these answers you are in a position to choose the best solution for your business and by having a clear understanding of your needs, should be able to get the best price from your website developer as well.

If you don't yet have a website developer, or your's is not asking the right questions, contact Websites With Purpose