Aaron Goldberg

Shopping Cart Features to Consider

Features to highly consider when choosing the most appropriate shopping cart software.

There are many things you must consider before choosing a shopping cart. For example, what kind of traffic will your site receive and who is your customer base? How many different products do you plan on selling? These are things you will need to keep in mind in addition to the following. 

Cost

Another feature that is worth thinking about is cost. The price range of shopping carts is pretty wide and you can find systems that are hosted remotely that cost anywhere from $20 a month to $100 a month based on the selected features. In some situations you may find your web host provides a shopping cart system as part of the hosting for an additional fee from $25 to $150 per month. In some cases, it may even cost more based on what your ecommerce site needs. If you need more customization and control then you may want to install a system on your own web server. 

Capacity

When you are looking for a shopping cart one of the most basic things to look for is its capacity. You need a cart that can not only handle your current item inventory but that also has the ability to grow with your company as you expand. You need a cart that will be able to offer more products in the future should you decide to increase your product line. There are quite a few shopping cart systems that can handle an unlimited amount of products.

Setup

Another aspect you will want to consider is how easy the software is to setup and customize. Some have installation scripts that are web based and all that is necessary is following the prompts. Then, there are others that are difficult to use because they have open source codes and a basic understanding of programming language is necessary in order to install this type of shopping cart. 

Customer Use

Something else that is very important is how easy the shopping cart makes the checkout process for customers. It is important to have a checkout process that involves as few steps as possible. The more steps included means the more customers who will abandon their carts and find a different store that doesn’t require so much effort to buy the item. Keep this in mind and even consider a one page checkout because these are preferred by customers. 

SEO Friendly

Finally, you want the shopping cart to be search engine friendly. This means you want the catalog of items your ecommerce site sells to be easily searchable. This means not using dynamic pages and finding a shopping cart system that use static pages to assist in SEO efforts. 

Article Tags: Shopping Cart

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