Having a good product line to sell on the Internet is only part of the key to success with an eCommerce business. You also must have an attractive and easy to use website. Most importantly, your shopping cart should be easy to use as well. Without a good shopping cart, your sales will suffer, even if you have a good product. The following are three attributes of a good shopping cart.
Easy to add and take out items
It should be easy for your customer to put items in a shopping cart and go back to shopping. If it is difficult to do this, you will be losing sales. A customer may get excited about finding something they like and proceed to checkout, but once they are reminded by a clearly labeled button to keep shopping, they may do so, and the result may be additional sales.
The checkout process is simple
Most of the checkout process is done on one page. If a customer has to click through several pages to complete the order, they may abandon the shopping cart, and you will lose a sale. All of the shipping charges should be calculated for the customer. If the charges vary by destination or weight, this information should already be fed into the shopping cart and the shipping charges calculated and displayed in an easy-to-read fashion for the customer. If there is a choice of shipping options, these should be clearly labeled as well. The customer needs to know both how much the shipping will cost as well as how it will arrive. A delivery time window should also be included if available.
A variety of ways to pay
A shopping cart needs to accommodate a variety of ways to pay. This goes beyond taking credit cards, but also the manner in which they are taken. Popular Internet payment services should be offered, but you will want to have a merchant account and a gateway service for your website, so you will be able to take credit cards directly on your site. Many Internet shoppers prefer to pay this way. This means that the shopping cart design must integrate with all of the popular gateways for credit card payments found on the Internet.
Always keep in mind the importance of the shopping cart when putting your eCommerce website together. There are many good companies that can design an eCommerce store for you with a good shopping cart. One example of this type of company is Solid Cactus.
