Ecommerce is one of the most sought solution for online business. There are a lot of open source as well paid shopping cart softwares offering different type of features, few suits for some requirements, others suits for other few requirements and at one stage it becomes very hectic for anyone to choose the most suitable shopping cart software for the application.Following topics might help you to choose the most suitable shopping cart software for your business.

What is a shopping cart ?
The most important question. Shopping cart is a series or bundle of scripts packed together to keep the track of products, a visitor buys and store till the checkout. It is a script which helps buyers to search/browse different products, collect them in the shopping basket (add to cart) and then submit that on the counter (checkout) to calculate (checkout) and then pay the amount (using payment gateway) and then get the products (shipping) online.

There are many free and premium shopping cart softwares with different features and making it difficult for you to choose one !!!!

Free or premium shopping carts?
Before choosing any software package, its important to know your requirement, how and what you want your application to do? you may need few or more features of any application, choose which is more near to your requirement.Be careful not to limit yourself either - you may only want limited features initially, but what about in the future? The application you choose may be flexible to implement new features. Some application offer future updations at regular intervals, choose which one is more felxible to future updates.

Premium shopping carts can cost you between $150-$400 for a normal shopping cart application with or without design implementations.

Free ecommerce solutions:

There are few free ecommerce solutions, like paypal which allows you to put your products online and are paid online thru paypal and you have to pay only a nominal fee per transaction. Transaction is fully secure.

There are many other opensource applications offering applications, with so many features that you can build your online stock with different payment options,different features etc like oscommerce,creloaded etc.

What other features do shopping carts have?
The current era of ecommerce applications can be considered as the brightest and more advance era with a lot of advanced features.However there are few features which needs to be in your application to make it a standard web store.

a) Easy category/product Navigation: Your storefront should have very easy navigation and search feature. Ideally divided in different categories for easy navigation.Displaying hot/featured products highlighted to draw attention of users.

b)Suggest sell/cross selling functions: While shopping (browsing thru products) if shopping cart is smart enoough to suggest some more products related to the current one specially with discount will motivate users to go for the product.This is considered one of the major strategies to attract more users by offering discounts on the same product or related products. So similar feature in the shopping cart might boost your sale.

c)Quantity discounts/coupons: I personally recommend this. Offering discount after a number of purchases, a fixed amount to motivate the buyers. Also offering coupon codes to potential customers as part of marketing campaign, with this code shopping cart will automatically deduct the amount from the total and will offer low price to the customer.

d)Newsletter functions : Through this feature you are alwasy in contact with the customer. While you have any offer/discount or special campaign this is the best way to be attached with the customers, sending them mails/newsletter. And also its an way to create an address book for future campaigns.

e)Affiliate modules : This is the need of the market and one of the low cost way of advertising your product. This way you advertise your products on other websites adn pay based on the performance only after the order is processed(paid). An affiliate module can handle the signup, provide statistics,streamline communiction and keep track of payments to be made to the affiliates.

f) Other features commonly incorporated into carts include inventory tracking, shipping, sales tax calculation, stationery creation/management, reviews and wish lists.

Apart from these features there are other factors which you need to consider before choosing the applicaiton, if you have already hosting you need to check if the application will be supported by your hosting or not,budget,payment gateway,shipping support and the most important if the application is capable enough to carry your business in long terms and support system. For long term prospect better support system is most important which can incorporate the latest changes in the market.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites