Simple or complex shopping cart?

Published on January 24, 2012 Simple or complex shopping cart?

Once you’ve found your winning business idea, done your research to determine that there’s demand for that product, determined your point of difference in the market compared to your competitors, figured out your marketing approach and business name and are ready to get going – the next question is what shopping cart you need for your business.

There are many ways to cut the cake of determining the cart for your needs – design, commerce functionality, integration, scalability, the list goes on. For many it comes down to the question of whether you need something that’s simple easy to use or complex and powerful. That’s one way to look at it, but we would say why not just have both? 

If you choose your cart technology carefully you can have your cake and eat it too. There are many shopping cart software choices out there that are way under-powered for the needs of a small to medium business, and woefully lacking for the needs of larger businesses too. At the other end of the scale there are shopping carts that are designed to squeeze every last cent out of a small business owner through fees in development and customisation – needing that you have almost a rocket science doctorate to even understand.

We believe that a shopping cart website should do the following:

• Look good. Getting the job done is important, but will you get customers if your site looks ugly and unprofessional. It’s no longer 1997 and the Internet has come a long way since the days of Frontpage websites. You need to pay as much attention to your store front as you would to your shop front in a mall. Under do your look and you’re underselling your business. We believe you should have a cracker design that is personalised to your business needs. That’s why we have developed high quality base designs that are colour and graphics customised to your business.
• Be able to grow with your business. You might not need all of the functionality on offer when you start out, but do you want to build your shopping cart website, start getting customers and then have to change later? We believe in offering shopping carts that are easy to get up to speed with, well supported, and can offer more functionality for your business as your needs grow. There are a wealth of untapped features in Ozcart online stores just waiting to be discovered. We believe in stores that can handle a small number of products, as well as a multi department mega store.
• Be friendly. That’s SEO friendly, admin friendly and customer friendly. Who needs a cart that the search engines cant’ index, that you can’t get around in admin to manage your orders (if you’re a successful business you’ll be hopefully spending a lot of time there), and be customer friendly so that customers find the checkout experience easy to use and feel good about your online store. And return to buy more!
• Have marketing tools and features. Marketing tools like reward points, specials (with automatic begin and end dates), category sales, gift vouchers, wishlists, free shipping per product, all at your disposal give you an arsenal of tactics at your fingertips to respond to events around you as you need to.
• Good reporting. Reports help you plan and understand how you are doing. Visitors to your site, your conversion rates, what people have been searching in your site for, how they found you, links to even more comprehensive tools like Google Analytics and Google Webamaster tools all help you build and grow your store – and understand how you are doing.
• Australian features and Australian support. Hit the ground running with ATO compliant invoices, Australian live shipping calculators, Australian currencies and languages, Australian states, Australian payment methods and more.
• A secure platform to run on – world class hosting in a high performance data centre running on powerful server boxes that are not overloaded.

There’s no reason that you can’t have complex features presented in an easy way and have a powerful shopping cart that works for your business. If that’s what you want then Ozcart the hosted shopping cart for you.