Shopping carts for websites: what to look for

Published on April 22, 2011 Shopping carts for websites: what to look for

If you want to sell online, what should you be looking for: shopping carts for websites or websites with shopping carts?

We can answer that question for you with another question: do you want the focus of your business to be your shop or will your shop supplement your other activities?

If you want your shop to be the centre of attention, then make it so by using an all-in-one shopping cart website solution. You can always supplement the store with a secondary blog pointing back to your store, or supplement the site with sub-sites like a blog, gallery, or forum as you need. You’ll benefit from the centralised management, and you won’t be left trying to iron out compatibilities between your cart and the core software that you have running on the site.

What’s more you will get everything else that comes from an all-in-one website solution: the security being taken care of behind the scenes, access to web design services that could have otherwise been outside your budget, affordable monthly prices and commercial quality support. Choosing the right shopping cart provider and you may also be able to have some kind of personalisation to get the site just the way you want it.

If on the other hand you want to plug a shopping cart into an existing website, you may benefit from simplicity in getting the code into your site (you would normally just get some code to add in to the page you are creating).

BUT and it’s a big but…. what about the security and how will you integrate all the individual elements to get them the way you want it? The best kind of cart is integrated and not tacked on, and you’ll need a high degree of technical knowledge to do it well.

So here’s what to look for:

• Security – it’s mandatory to protect your customer’s privacy, and it’s essential to your professional reputation. Don’t take it lightly.
• Design – a great web design isn’t just a good idea : a spectacular ecommerce design is absolutely mandatory if you want any chance of success for your online store
• The cart experience from your customer’s points of view
• The ability of the cart to get indexed in Google, and the ability to integrate with Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools so you can track how you’re going
• Support – who will help you when you’re stuck?

We recommend you seriously consider a hosted ecommerce solution like Ozcart for your shopping cart website and do it properly to start with. It will give your online shop the best boost for your business and it’s the smart choice.

See our shopping cart designs and ecommerce features today and see for yourself.