Shopping for Shopping Carts

There are several steps to create a successful ecommerce website. First of all, you need to know what you are doing or your success is going to take a long time if it comes at all. If you don’t know anything about web design, Internet marketing, and the like, then it’s best to outsource some of the jobs to have the end product you have been dreaming of.

First of all, you want to make sure your website is well designed and mimics the bigger ecommerce sites like Amazon and Buy. The reason why is because you want to create a sense of familiarity with your customers and if your site looks much like some of the bigger sties then they will feel more comfortable and more likely will buy your products or services. Don’t worry about getting your site confused with any of the big sites. In fact, this might even work out to your advantage! A lot can be learned from the big sites in the way they arrange content and products on their pages as well as the way the shopping cart process works. The reason why is because these big websites have done a great deal of research to find out what works for online shoppers. Take this research and use it to your benefit without having to spend a dollar!

Now, do some research on the shopping carts the other sites use. Which ones work well and are fast? Customers want the checkout process to be fast and for all of their charges to be presented up front, including shipping, before they enter all of their credit card information. Buy being up front about costs you stand to sell more than by “sucking” the customer in. Many online retailers think that they will get the shoppers to enter all of their information and then they will simply finish the checkout process so they don’t have to go through the process again on another site. However, many shoppers get annoyed with this and will simply abandon their cart and move on. Don’t count on getting customers through forcing them through a series of pages in the checkout process and banking on them following through simply because they already invested so much time. Too many ecommerce retailers are finding out this is not the case and that many who do finish the process never shop with the site again to avoid the hassle. Return customers are important and alienating customers is not helpful so it’s definitely worth keeping in mind!