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Ecommerce Shopping Cart Solution For Your Business

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Ecommerce Shopping Cart Solution For Your Business

The key to a successful business is to allow customers to make proper purchases online without any restrictions or hassles. The ecommerce shopping cart solution is the best possible way for companies to achieve this so the customers can choose their products through a flexible check out system. Lots of professional services offer their own versions of ecommerce shopping cart solution written in various languages. Thus, you can select the software based on your preferences and the requirements of your site. However, you should always create a checklist of certain factors before you sign up with any particular service to provide an ecommerce shopping cart for your site.

The first and most important thing on your mind should be the stability of the software. During the design of the ecommerce shopping cart, you should see that it does not crash upon frequent use or provide incorrect results or calculations during checkout. The customers should be completely at ease with the ecommerce shopping cart without running into problems from time to time. Depending on the server hosting, you might choose to prepare the ecommerce shopping cart software under a certain language. You need to perform lots of extensive checking before implementing the code.

The primary feature list comes next on the checklist. Your ecommerce shopping cart software should include all the standard customer requirements as well as additional features like tax calculation and discount processing. Depending on the data inventory possible, the ecommerce shopping cart software should allow the customers to choose as many products as they want without imposing any limits. Instead of adding an item to a list for checkout, the software must allow you to fully manage the online store as an administrator and access the products section as a user. Companies that design online shopping cart have their own feature list which you should check before the selection.

You should always make sure that the entire process is fast and efficient to make sure that the customer has a positive experience with purchases made through online shopping cart. If the entire checkout process is slow and buggy, it might turn away customers from the site. The final product design and performance of the shopping cart solution should meet the standards and allow the customer to process the transactions quickly. This is the precise reason why you should hire a professional and experienced service to work on a shopping cart solution for your business.

Customers can be extremely cautious about the mode of payment that is implemented in the module of your online shopping cart solution. You should always allow for secure payment procedures including link redirects to their online transaction channels. There should be no extra charges levied and the storefront and checkout modules should integrate properly with each other to make the overall product a success. Depending on the usability of your online shopping cart solution, customers could recommend or reject your site altogether. In order to achieve the best customer feedback as well as increased sales, your ecommerce shopping cart solution needs to be feature rich and stable so the checkout process takes minimal time for shoppers.

The ecommerce shopping cart solution is the best possible way for companies to achieve this so the customers can choose    their products through a flexible check out system.


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Make shopping convenient with shopping carts

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Make shopping convenient with shopping carts

This is the age of convenient shopping. Gone are the days when one had to carry large packets stuffed with commodities which made it impossible to make huge purchases in one go. These days, however, retailers are too eager to attract the customers’ attention by doling out practically everything under one roof and also at a price that fits every pocket. This is advantageous both for the customers who can save time and also for the retailers who can rake in profits at the same time earning a goodwill for themselves.

With the concept of supermarkets now in vogue, the mode of shopping too has undergone a sea change. To make things convenient for the customer, nowadays there are shopping carts which come fitted with swivel wheels that allow the cart to be rolled in any given direction with ease thus facilitating the buying process.

However, with the passage of time, the design of shopping carts has changed immensely. Now, available in multiple colors, they range from folding grocery carts, wholesale folding shopping carts and easy wheels shopping cart to folding metal shopping cart, shopping trolley, small shopping cart…..so on and so forth. Each serves its own purpose. As the very name suggests, folding grocery carts are ideal for carrying groceries and laundry. Grocery is a part and parcel of our daily lives. So the easier you make it, the better it is. They serve many other purposes which include carrying a child even. These carts normally look like a car or van equipped with a steering wheel and sometimes a horn where a child can sit. This is a huge stress reliever for the parents as they neither have to leave the child at home in somebody else’s care nor carry the baby in their hands throughout the entire purchase process.

Recent studies have indicated that stores which have not resorted to shopping carts have suffered poor sales in the recent years. But ones who opted for the same have already registered booming sales. The shopping carts have revolutionized the buying experience of the elderly shoppers too who tend to get tired very easily due to old age. But with these carts, shopping has now become a mere cakewalk even for the oldies. They can also use the carts to transport their purchased goods to the cars and then leave them at the parking lot to be picked up by the store personnel and returned to the storage area later on.

There are different types of shopping carts available at various specialty stores. So if you need some for your own outlet, pick them up from the concerned stores. Some of the most popular ones include transit carts, market mate, two wheeled folding cart with extra shelf, hook and go urban shopping cart, super deluxe swiveler cart etc. They have some of the best features which make them a raging craze among retailers who want to woo customers by introducing the concept of easy and convenient shopping.

 

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Mr. Wesley Carr is a retail shop owner. He is an avid shopaholic and likes to visit the shops wherever he goes. While browsing he came across this website which deals in shopping carts of varied colors and designs. So you can check this out at your own convenience for more information related to these shopping aids.

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Shopping Cart Technology Limitations and Moving/pushing Product Catalog Data to Shopping Comparison Sites and Marketplaces: 5 Q & A’ to Help

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Shopping Cart Technology Limitations and Moving/pushing Product Catalog Data to Shopping Comparison Sites and Marketplaces: 5 Q & A’ to Help

As EVP at MerchantAdvantage, one of my responsibilities is to analyze multiple shopping cart technologies before integrating storefront data into our Channel Management system.

This is an essential process as it ensures that an online merchant’s data is compliant with our data transport system from which we easily distribute data into various marketing channels, such as shopping comparison sites, comparison shopping engines, marketplaces, such as Amazon, Shop.com and Underbid, and other unique marketing channels such as m-commerce sites, such as iSave.com, mPoria.com, mShopper.com, and review and coupon sites, such as PowerReviews.com and MyCoupons.com.

As I do this, I have established 3 points of analysis to make the process as reliable as possible. As technology changes, and new marketing outlets emerge, I think it is important for each merchant to look at their shopping cart infrastructure and analyze the ease of portability of their data into other systems in order to keep ongoing marketing integration “surprise-less”.

Merchants should perform this type of analysis in between the busy season; let’s say before or after March – ergo after the holiday season and before the summer rush. My suggestion is that a technical person should compile a list of questions to ask their shopping cart vendor, in order to ensure that the online merchant fully understands the “power” and “limitations” of their shopping cart technology and how it allows the online merchant to utilize many other software technologies to help the online merchant grow their business.

To begin, here are some definitions to consider – just so we understand each other.

Portability: A shopping cart’s capacity to integrate into a totally disparate system without losing product data impact.

Data Impact: The scale of impact that product data has functioning independently within an online merchant’s or marketed outside of an online merchant’s website. Product data contained within a an individual shopping cart, and website, may have “high impact” on marketing — as product descriptions, manufacturing names, pictures, pricing, and general marketing is robust and current.

However, if incorrectly formatted and mapped to an outside “software system”, the robust product data will have a “low impact” if it is taken out of its current shopping cart technology infrastructure and put on/within a marketing. In order to maintain product data’s “high impact” it is essential to ensure that the original data is mapped to correspond to the required elements of a marketing channel. This might include updating and creating: varied coding requirements, dropping/eliminating symbols, dropping/eliminating line breaks, adding varied prices and inventories levels, changing pictures and product names, and updating marketing descriptions.

An example of something that can cause “low impact” data on marketing channels is a shopping cart’s capacity to output a “new” product file on a scheduled basis, without encoding or symbols. This type of “new and daily export” yields usable data and not blank columns, or duplicate columns, in a data feed to marketing feed, that then will be rejected.

Marketing Outlet or Channel: A separate system used to market product data and drive sales into an online merchant’s site or on another site on behalf of the online merchant.

Marketplace: A marketing channel where the purchase is made outside of the cart and orders are fulfilled by the merchant. The order may be processed by the marketplace or the merchant, but the merchant is somewhat invisible during the view and ordering process. Examples would be Amazon.com, Shop.com, and Underbid.com.

CSE: Comparison Shopping Engine, a.k.a. Comparison Shopping site. This is a marketing channel where the goal is to drive a consumer back to your shopping cart to complete the purchase there. CSEs may charge the merchant a pay-per-click pay-per-lead or commission from all sales referred by the CSE to the online merchant, such as couparison shopping sites do.

Parent /Child Relationship, Options: Many products have options associate with the product before a final purchase is made, i.e., size, color, etc. This is especially true with clothing. These options show up on web pages and the website directs the consumer to select certain options related to a product before the consumer proceeds to checkout. This is great when the purchase happens on the merchant’s website, but how does an online merchant handle all of these options when exporting data to marketing channels and having to deal with a myriad of taxonomy and mapping issues as they relate to each marketing channel?

To answer this, the online merchant must assess:

1. the origination point of the data within their shopping cart technology

2. the options available to access the date therein

3. portability issues (i.e. ease of output and export)

…ultimately forcing the online merchant to analyze how the data is stored in its rawest form in the original database.

Just because a shopping cart technology can export data does not mean that that data is exported in the “form” that you need it exported. For instance, some shopping cart technologies export feature creates new line items for each option; some may create a field with every possible color/size possibility, while others do not.

Essentially shopping cart technologies, while trying to “play well with other,” simply do not and export features inherent in many shopping cart technologies are not designed to sync easily with the many requirements that are essential to working with marketing channels.

This lack of syncing of data is why we created MerchantAdvantage – to make the communication between systems seamless – and is the NUMBER ONE BREAKING POINT for online merchants to work with, and integrate with, systems and marketing channels out side of the their shopping cart technology.

So what should an online merchant be asking themselves to work effectively and efficiently with marketing channels and other systems out side of their shopping cart technology?

Remembering the definitions I outlined above, here are the questions I ask of online merchants about their shopping cart technology before transporting their data to ensure that we have the same “highest impact” data on/within marketing channels. I would be glad to do it with any online merchant, just give us a call at MerchantAdvantage, or you can do it on your own.

5 Questions to ask about your company data & company to see if your shopping cart is portable:

1. Where will this data be used to market? Marketplaces, CSEs, other marketing channels?

2. Is there a unique identifier for each product that stays the same all of the time?

a. Is that unique number for joined products (options) referenced in all joined products (i.e., do child products reference parent – see definition above)?

3. Are there Product URLs and Image URLs? And do they work?

4. Are there encoded characters, ASCII Characters, Line-breaks, or data anomalies?

5. Can any product data export process be automated?

a. Is the location to where exports are updated and pushed to always available on the internet

b. Is the location updated on a scheduled basis that parallels your shopping cart technology cart updates and changes?

5 Questions to ask to see if your portability is optimized:

1. Is each piece of necessary data stored in separate fields or columns, i.e., manufacturer, manufacturer part number, or availability, and not all clumped together in one general description.

Special Note: Some marketing channels require this data in different orders and formatting unique to their marketing channel.

2. Are the marketing descriptions sensible and concise, containing all important data at the front of the description (within first 100 characters)?

Special Note: descriptions can be indexed/searchable and are usually trimmed to the first set of 100 characters.

3. Is the “Cost Field” present in the export?

Special Note: Adjustments to the “Pricing” and “Marketing” fields may be made at any time of the product data dispersion process.

4. Do the unique identifiers match competitors’ unique identifiers?

Special Note: Consumers will and can see your items when viewing competitors’ products on CSEs.

5. Does my data meet all of the requirements of each requested marking channel that I am trying to get/feed to?

Special Note: Each marketing channel requires different types and formats of data delivery.

Okay, now what?

My suggestions:

1. after each question has been answered and each possible point-of-failure has been addressed then you can move onto the planning and process of into which marketing channels you want to work with and feed your product catalog data.

2. You have taken the most important step of data feed integration and marketing, namely understanding what your shopping cart technology allows you to do and not to do and, most important, understanding what you need to do to make sure that you create and market the “highest impact” data to your marketing channels.

3. Integration is ready to be achieved.

Good luck and if you would like to make your life a lot simpler, give us a shout at MerchantAdvantage, we would be glad to work with you, and start feeding and having fun with over 100 marketing channels, cost effectively, with the most uptime, least surprises and zero technician’s heart attacks!!

Happy Holidays!

– Chip Arndt

chip@eTaildTail.com

chip@merchantadvantage.com

I am lucky to have the opportunity to leverage over 10 years of internet e-commerce experience to bring small to mid-sized merchants tips and advice to make their businesses grow. While I write eTaildTail, it is actually one voice of many minds. More precisely, my blog entries are powered by the brain power and knowledge base of the team at MerchantAdvantage and my time in the world of online commerce and the internet. That team has over 50 years of combined experience in online shopping and technical support and share a desire to learn all there is to know to help small to mid sized online merchants be successful.


We all know that the e-commerce and m-commerce (mobile commerce) marketplace is growing rapidly and so too are methods, philosophies and business applications to take advantage of this growth. With rapid growth comes the need to synthesize information so that the online merchant can quickly make prudent, short, and long term business decisions. Of equal importance is the need to share this information, because what works today often does not work tomorrow.


This reality led me to supplement my thoughts with an online forum for merchants to share their own stories and questions. I welcome anyone in the world of e-commerce and m-commerce into this forum with the goal to help all of us. Just click on the eTail dTail Tattler tab.


Beyond my opinion, which some may not agree with from time to time, and this interactive forum, the real value of eTaildTail is to share information on what is happening in the world of e-commerce and m-commerce so that you can grow your business. Each day I will report on topics important to better market your online business. This will include industry updates, commentary on other people’s insights, links to other resources, and above all attempt to be a daily resource for you to help make your online business successful.


I will write from trade shows, from my office [yes it over looks the ocean = lucky me] and from the road, as I learn of information that I think is important to the small to mid-sized online merchant. While my blog is focused on marketing solutions for all of you, I often will speak to other issues that may affect all of us, such as “internet neutrality”, state and federal regulations for online e-commerce…you get the point.


I also love to bring other experts into our world, so I will link to other bloggers, who are far more knowledgeable about certain topics, and encourage industry insiders to make guest comments and appearances. By the way, if you know of some people who might want to be a part of eTaildTail community, in some way, please let me know. The internet is a powerful medium of communication and with your participation we can grow eTaildTail together to be a wonderful meeting place to learn and to help provide you with the answers to grow your business.


Welcome one and all and thank you in advance for sending me your thoughts and insights.


Chip Arndt

Reporting from my home base in South Florida


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Decreased Abandoned Shopping Carts, Increase Sales

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Decreased Abandoned Shopping Carts, Increase Sales

The virtual market has arrived and with the growing number of online stores, it seems like the trend is here to stay. Unlike real time stores, one does not need to invest heavily in virtual stores, and so even small business owners find the deal lucrative. Virtual stores are easy to create and manage, which has added immensely to their popularity. Depending upon the investment that a business owner would like to make, both in terms of time and money, one can create a virtual store for the business.

The convenience that these virtual stores offer to the online shopper cannot be matched by real time stores. The ease of begin able to compare several different manufacturers of a product and then purchase it online, along with having it delivered to your door step is indeed  magnetic. While initially buyers were skeptical of products that they saw online and not in reality, over the years, online dealers have established a gold reputation for themselves, which has added to an increase in online shoppers. Most online stores offer money back guarantees, much like real time stores, which takes away the fear of being cheated from the prospects mind. Almost all commercial ventures today understand the growing importance of E commerce, and virtual stores are the gateway of commercial activities on the internet.

Though having concluded that virtual stores are convenient to both the seller and the buyer, it is a know fact that simply setting up a virtual store is not the answer to increasing online sales. In fact, despite adopting extremely sophisticated advertising and quality products, it is a fact that for every online transaction that is completed, almost four times as many are deserted. Apparently putting up several payment gateways and adopting highly developed shopping cart software does not seem to seal the deal either. These techniques work at only drawing the prospects attention and moving towards a possible sale. However, despite these efforts, it has been estimated that on an average 75% of shopping carts are abandoned before the deal can be closed. It is no wonder then that abandoned shopping carts are considered the biggest ‘bane of ecommerce’. 

An abandoned shopping cart is an incomplete transaction, which the prospect deserts before the final deal is sealed. Since the ultimate goal of all E commerce activity is sales, of course a conversion left half way is extremely damaging to the business. Businesses that operate online spend huge sums of money to setup a commercially viable virtual stores and are then aghast at the large number of abandoned shopping carts. Therefore, one can safely conclude that as important as setting up a virtual store, is decreasing abandoned shopping carts so that the sales maybe increased.

The solution comes in a two phase package. First is, understanding the reason why the percentage of abandoned shopping carts is so high, and the second phase is ensuring that these hurdles and problems are done away with.

Reasons for shopping cart abandonment:-

1) Shipping cost – Over 72% of prospects who leave the deal half way through, do so due to the high shipping cost that the site charges. The advantage of shopping in the convenience of ones home is definitely attractive to the customer, but is marred by high cost of delivery. Also since shipping charges are as a rule not refundable, prospects are deterred from closing the deal.

2) Competition comparisons – One of the major attractions of online shopping is begin able to easily compare several manufacturers of similar products, so as to choose the most feasible deal. It has been observed that 61% prospects move on to greener pastures and abandon their shopping carts midway, when they find that the competition has more to offer.

3) Second thoughts- While initially taken in by the product and its cost, at the time of final payment, 51% of online shoppers abandon the shopping cart due to second thoughts. Wanting to think over the deal a little more, these prospects are likely to simply abandon the shopping cart and maybe come back later for the purchase. It is also a fact that 96% of browsers never return to a site even if they did buy something from that site.

4) Decide otherwise- While second thoughts do leave some room for a comeback, there are 56% prospects that choose items but give up the idea of buying them completely while going through the process of the ultimate purchase. They may decide that the item is not required or not as attractive that they had thought before.

5) Collective cost of products – While shopping, prospects tend to pick up several products and dump them in their shopping carts. On finally viewing the total cost of these products, 43% find them too high and therefore completely abandon the shopping cart that they had selected rather than go through the items again.

6) Length of check out process- 41% buyers abandon shopping carts because they find that the time required for the final check out is too lengthy. Irritated by the time that the check out process is taking, these buyers despite being committed to the deal simply abandon the shopping cart and move on.

7) Personal information for check out process- There are several website that seem to go on and on asking the prospect to give their personal information for the final deal to go through. Irritated by this, 35 % buyers tend to leave the cart and move away from the final transaction.

8) Registration process- There are several sites who have a pre requisite to register before the final buying process can be undertaken. 34% buyers decide that they would rather abandon the shopping cart than register for the site. 

9) Complicated check out process- Confused by complicated check out process 27% buyers decide to give up buying the product(s) online rather than try and figure out how the system works.

10) Reliability of the site- Cautious about the site’s authenticity and reliability, 31% buyers decide to not go through with the deal despite having started it. The fear of begin cheated online is much more than being cheated in the real world, since it is much easier to disappear in the virtual world.

Having nailed most of the reasons for abandoned shopping carts, the next phase involves finding solutions for these problems.

Solutions for shopping cart abandonment:-

1) Quick downloads- It is crucial for the sale to meet its final transaction that the web page does not take too long to download. On an average the shopper will not give your site more than 10 seconds to download. It is therefore important that the web page is not filled with images and that the graphics if any, are compressed for easy downloads.

2) Easy navigation – If the buyer wanted to solve a jig saw puzzle, a games site is what he/she would be visiting. Keep navigation and links of the website clear and simple. Golden rules like a right hand index, links to the buy tab and home page on all sub pages and pastels backgrounds should never be overlooked. Over decades people have come to expect certain tabs at certain spots on a website and not finding them there, tends to make the prospect move on.

3) Short sale routine – There are many sites that go on forcing a sales pitch on the prospect despite the customer already begin sold to the idea. Allow the client to buy the product as soon as he/she is convinced. Close the deal quickly, so as to not allow time to the prospect to rethink. For this it is important that the journey between the sales pitch and the payment gateway be as short as possible.

4) Lay down facts – Do not allow grey area to creep into your sales pitch. State the facts about the product in clear black and white terms. The price, the shipping cost, the availability and other such facts must be laid down in simple and clear terms to the prospect, so that it does not come as a shock later.

5) Offer attractions – If you find that the customer is leaving the site without purchasing what was placed in the shopping cart, step in with an attractive offer, which may be introduced via a pop up window. This works very well in cases where the prospect is half sold to the idea and just needs a bit more cajoling to undertake the final transaction.

6) Avoid distractions – Do not place banner ads or other similar distractions on your shopping cart. While the prospect is having a look at the product(s) you do not want to distract him/her. It is therefore very important that you do not fall into the trap of allowing other sites to take your prospect away by letting a small blinking advertisement break the shopper’s concentration.

While there are several other tips that help increase conversion rates for commercial websites, the basic essence of each trick is to add to the shopping experience of the customer. It is imperative that problems and solutions both be figured out from the client’s point of view. Be it a real time store or a virtual one, the customer is the final and most crucial link of the sales process and therefore must be kept happy at all given times.

President, Creative and Marketing Director of a full service creative design, web and business marketing company:


Mantic Business Brand Solutions

www.manticbbs.com


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SEO Friendly Shopping Cart

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SEO Friendly Shopping Cart

Once you have a product and a merchant account, you need some way to let your visitors visit your store, select products, add them to a cart and check out easily through a secure payment gateway. Typically, this is what a good ecommerce shopping cart interface does. The more intuitive your shopping cart software, the easier it is for customers to shop.

So, a shopping cart is nothing but an ecommerce solution that makes it easy for customers to shop with you. Right? Yes … and no.

Today, shopping cart solutions have grown much beyond their original scope. Time was when shopping carts only controlled inventory, accepted orders and processed payments. Today, all that is history. In order to combine a variety of useful features into one shopping cart solution, companies have been bundling quite a number of useful ‘extras’ to the original shopping cart. Ready to go front end designs, great administrative features, advanced security and supported payment gateways are some of these. With the help of these, it is possible for owners to get their internet store up and running within a few short minutes.

But, the question still remains – how do you bring customers to your store?

Search engines are the back bone of a web business. As business owners may be aware, the main job of a website is to woo search engine rankings. Search engines are very powerful; however, taming them is rather simple. A number of minute steps taken at the right time is all it takes to top the rankings at Google and Yahoo search engines.

Many companies are now offering what is called the SEO friendly shopping cart. In an effort to enhance marketing, SEO friendly shopping carts offer a number of neat features that make these shopping carts very valuable to an online trader. SEO friendly shopping carts take care of search engine optimization, so all you have to do is plug in the shopping cart solution and get ready to sell.

SEO friendly shopping carts have very powerful in-built SEO features that make it easy for you to optimize your website for search engines. They help you promote your website by generating search engine friendly web pages. Well-designed front ends make it easy for crawlers to pick up key words. Aptly titled pages are a favorite with search engines and SEO friendly shopping carts title each of your pages appropriately so they show up when customers search for your products. SEO friendly shopping carts also generate sufficient keyword density to help your pages rank high in internet searches. Search engine friendly product catalog, automatic generation of a well defined sitemap and search engine friendly URLs are other useful features. Of course, SEO friendly shopping carts also add the necessary meta, title and description tags to your web pages.

SEO friendly shopping carts take much of the hard work out of online marketing. With a robust solution, business owners have to do little more than stocking up on their inventory and getting ready for sales.

Pinnacle Cart provides affordable ecommerce software and hosting solution that suit your budget.


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Part I – 5 Steps to Set up Your Shopping Cart

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Part I – 5 Steps to Set up Your Shopping Cart

It seems like everyone has a website with a shopping cart, you’d like to have one as well. Where do you begin? It can be a daunting task to set up a shopping cart. This article presents the five steps you need to go through to a have the smooth installation.

Step 1 – Choosing the Shopping Cart

Begin by researching which shopping cart is provided by your hosting company. While using the shopping cart provided by the hosting company is the easiest route, keep in mind that this product serves a wide audience and may not do exactly what you would like it to do. For example, most canned shopping cart applications allow you to customize your storefront using templates; however, you may be limited to the photos or color choices defined within a particular template. Some shopping carts allow you to write custom cascading style sheets (CSS) code, but, CSS is limited to color and font choices only. On the plus side, the shopping cart provided by the hosting company will get you going much faster.

Going the custom route can be beneficial if you have particular needs that cannot be met with a canned application. Several options are available: open source, shareware and fully licensed products. To establish a custom shopping cart, you have to understand the scripting language to be used and have the ability to set up the shopping cart on the platform where your site is hosted.

When making a decision regarding which custom option to use, keep in mind the tech support available to you. With open source and shareware tools, you may have to wait for a while to get an answer to your question.

Step 2 – Set up your Merchant Account

This portion of the process takes the longest time – sometimes up to two or three weeks. Make sure that the merchant account that you set up works with the shopping cart you are selecting and can be hosted on the same platform as your website. The three major categories of merchant accounts that can be created are:

Standard Merchant Account – Using this account, you will be able to sell regular products, such as books, shoes or electronics.

Specialty Merchant Account – This account is created for merchants that sell computer software, flowers or training materials.

International Merchant – If you intend to sell your products internationally, then you will need this merchant account.

Your banker can arrange a meeting with a representative who will explain the fee structure and terms and conditions for setting up a merchant account.

Step 3 – Payment Gateway

Usually, when you set up a merchant account, your payment gateway will be set up automatically as well. In the case where the merchant account is not compatible with the shopping cart, you might have to set up the payment gateway manually. This process often involves a conference call between the payment gateway representative, the merchant account representative, and the technical person who is helping you program the shopping cart.

Step 4 – Set-up SSL

Once you set up your shopping cart, you need to add a secured socket layer (SSL) certificate to the portion of the site that houses the shopping cart. For example, you may place your shopping cart under the sub-domain as follows
shop.domainname.com

Most people won’t buy from your site unless you have the SSL installed. SSL prevents hackers from stealing your customers’ personal information, including credit card numbers. Typically, a SSL certificate is issued for a year and is location-specific, meaning you can’t move the certificate from one domain to another. Therefore, you should not to change the location of the shopping cart once you have applied the SSL certificate because you will have to purchase a new certificate for the new location.

Step 5 – Refund Policy, Privacy Policy, Terms and Conditions

Before bank representatives approve merchant accounts they often request that the site states your refund policy, privacy policy and terms and conditions. If you don’t offer a refund, this policy should be clearly stated on your site.

This article described the steps necessary for setting up a successful shopping cart installation. In Part II of this article, we’ll delve into the details of setting up the shopping cart to attract buyers and entice them to buy from you.

Resources

Visit http://www.cxtgroup.com/shopping-cart.html to see a graphical view of the steps involved and learn to learn about the shopping carts. If you would like to discuss your particular needs in setting up a shopping cart, call us today toll-free at 877-439-2539 for a FREE 1-hour consultation.

Resources Visit http://www.cxtgroup.com/shopping-cart.html to see a graphical view of the steps involved and learn to learn about the shopping carts. If you would like to discuss your particular needs in setting up a shopping cart, call us today toll-free at 877-439-2539 for a FREE 1-hour consultation.


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Your Shopping Cart Needs To Be SEO Optimized

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Your Shopping Cart Needs To Be SEO Optimized

Given the level of competitions in commercial online businesses, you are well aware of the need to maximize the potential of your websites and other features that you might have. This includes optimizing your shopping cart by using SEO techniques to meet and go beyond the current web standards and enable you to get ahead of your competitors.

An online shopping cart is in itself a wise investment especially if you have a website geared towards commercial viability. The benefits of a shopping cart cannot be undermined. By having a shopping cart, you can manage more efficiently your product inventories. It is also a great means to convert website traffic to tangible sales. The shopping cart is useful application that can help increase your visibility on the internet which in turn can increase your return of investments.

The shopping cart is an innovative product that you should take full advantage of. And like any other investment, if you don’t take good care of your cart, it will not be worth anything. There are a number of ways where you can optimize your shopping cart.

When you customize your shopping cart remember to that little crawling neighborhood friend of yours: the spider. But in this case it’s more of the web spider concept that you need to worry about. It is important that your links on your shopping cart can be spidered. Ensure that your URLs will be easily remembered by both your clients and search engines. Using categories and product names on the URL is one way to keep search engines spidering your content.

One thing that you should avoid when optimizing your shopping cart are duplicate contents. You can have duplicate contents when you the same exact content in multiple categories. Your page rank can be affected by having duplicate contents.

Another thing that you should remember is to know your clients’ needs and how they go about finding them. When you created your shopping cart, use commonly searchable words to refer to your products. For instance, use “chair” if you’re selling a chair and not a “comfort device”. Make sure to use brand and specific model names on your inventory as well. Place them properly in the title and heading of the pages.

With regards to the SEO order, use proper title tags. Write creative meta descriptions as well as the texts describing the products and categories. Don’t forget to use proper headings.

Another aspect of SEO that you should incorporate in your shopping cart is linkbuilding. This is creating an opportunity for search engines to find and rank you. You will have to create a lot of links to your site. You can email various site owners and sell the idea of linking your site. It would be ideal to have site owners use your top keywords in the anchor text, though.

If you find SEO work complicated and troublesome, there are numerous specialists which can do the work for you. However, that would be additional costs on your end. It would be better to study the techniques and applications and do the basic optimization yourself.

In this day and age, being noticed on the internet is no longer as simple as creating your own website. You need to direct traffic to your webpages including your shopping cart and try to convert that web traffic into sales. The need to optimize your shopping cart is real and would be advantageous to you as well.

While many shopping carts now a days come with 2 or 3 of the components listed above. It’s difficult to find one which acommodates ALL SEO optimization  components, but there is one that comes to mind — Pinacle Cart.

Their current version is highly adaptable to all SEO tactics out there, including SEO friendly URL’s, proper .htaccess handling and mod rewrite syntaxes making Pinacle Cart a true winner in the Bang For Your Buck category. Plus, Pinacle Cart is one of the few companies which truly do want to help you succeed. Their support is truly amazing in every aspect and your feedback is always welcomed an tended to.

For more details and pricing on Pinacle Cart, be sure to check out their website over at http://pinaclecart.com when you have a minute. I have to tell you, they are not cheap, but (a) they are no more expensive than any other high quality shopping cart, but pound for pound, they are certainly worth EVERY penny.

Joey J, aka Mad Hat Marketer, has been successfully teaching offline businesses for over a decade and has recently transformed his business and entered the online industry to share his accolades of knowledge with online marketers and is currently finishing up his 4th online marketing study course.


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PHP Shopping Cart Script – Is It Hard to Create and Manage an Online Store?

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PHP Shopping Cart Script – Is It Hard to Create and Manage an Online Store?

Choosing the exact shopping cart script is the most important phase to make your online store a success. So it is very necessary to select the proper shopping cart script that can provide the desired features at an affordable price. PHP shopping cart script is the solution. This shopping cart script is capable of providing the features that you want to include in your online shop.

Every online store has some features in common, like- availability of the item, the quantity of buying items, calculating payments and also the additional shipping charge. This shopping cart script can accomplish these tasks within a minimum time and effort. This shopping cart script also supports a number of advanced features, like- grouping items into respective categories, configuring attributes of items, placing advertisements to your sites, makes searching process faster and many more. This script also provides the facility of making payments through PayPal. You can also change the look and feel of your site by changing the font, colors and icons, with the help of this shopping cart script.

Since PHP uses the most efficient MySQL database, so this shopping cart script is efficient in keeping a long list of desired products that customers want to buy. Managing your online store with this script is very easy because it requires less effort than other scripts. In addition, this shopping cart script supports a wide range of companies – from large to small online stores. All shopping cart systems have two components- storefront and administration. Storefront is that part of your online store where customers come to visit and buy products. Administration is that part of your online store where you manage the features of your online store. PHP shopping cart script is one of the most efficient shopping cart software that are capable of managing both of these two components very efficiently.

Therefore, we can see that, this shopping cart script provides the common as well as advanced features to make your online store stand out from the others. This shopping cart script provides an integrated, effective and customizable e-commerce solution. This shopping cart script helps to make your online store more popular than others by providing advanced features and options.

For every business, be it online or offline, a security measure is one of the major concerns. This shopping cart script, backed with the power of MySQL database, provides the highest level of security. Customers can add as many items as they want without thinking of security measures. Not only this, this shopping cart script is efficient enough in calculating the payments also. This shopping cart script gives the customers the accurate amount of payment including shipping charge and other taxes.

So, if you want to create your online store, you must use this shopping cart script because it facilitates you to create and manage online store without any hassles. This PHP shopping cart script is very easy to learn and use. So you can develop your online store with minimum effort and time.

Nitesh Patel is a blogger and also media partner of various website for work related to content, wordpress setup and customization if you want more advice or need help with content and wordpress you can contact me on My website Redefining Technology

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Features of an Effective online shopping Cart

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Features of an Effective online shopping Cart

Gone are those days when people would actually go to a market for shopping.Shoppinggoods online is the current trend now.Online shopping is the process where consumers directly buy goods or services from a seller through internet. Online shopping cart is a technology that is been in the market for the past few years. It is a software by which anybody can shop or sell any product from anywhere, rather than going into a market. Products like e-commerce, software, games, etc can be sold online and e-commerce payment processing is provided by online shopping carts.

Products can be added as well as removed from the online shopping cart. Shopping carts are mainly meant for those people who don’t have time to go for shopping in the markets; likewise they can save time and money. These new trends lead to the increasing number of shopping carts. In today’s competing world, online shopping cart software is the requirement of each company, to spread their market worldwide. This is quiet useful for both companies and buyers. Profit of custom shopping cart can be increased by increasing revenue and reducing cost. Even though there are a number of online shopping carts, providing communication, data management and security to the clients, each one among of are not good enough, you can rely only on a few.

Following are the features of online shopping cart:

Secure transaction – One of the most important features of custom shopping cart is secure transaction, from where you can develop a customer’s faith and this is how a Shopping Cart Company grows.

Easy back navigation – An online shopping cart should have the option of back navigation i.e., it should let the user navigate from one page to the other easily.

Customer support – You should provide unlimited support to your shopping cart, so in case if you are stuck with any problem, you can troubleshoot.

Automatic calculation of tax, shipping costs and total costs based on information from buyer’s address – Real time shipping rates should be offered by the shopping cart i.e., it does not make any sense in first buying the cost effective product and then add on the saved amount on delivery charges.

Payment processor – Most importantly you should check the number of payment processors to which the online shopping cart is integrated with, so you can determine how good the cart is. If the online cart is integrated with just one or two payment processors it is difficult shop.

Secure saving of customer information – Towards the end you should hunt for the safety and security of the online shopping cart script. If you neglect this parameter, there are chances of your personal details getting hacked while the transaction is taking place.

Enable editing option – Owner should be able to easily add, delete and modify the contents of shopping cart.

International currency payment support – The shopping cart software should support international currency payment.

Contents of final cart page – Final cart page should list all items, prices, user-specified parameters, shipping and handling charges, tax and estimated date of delivery.

Shopping cart is a crucial part of a site and so it is very necessary to satisfy the above conditions.

 


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Online Music Shopping with AR Rahman music online Store

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Online Music Shopping with AR Rahman music online Store

AR Rahman is the one of the most popular music maestro of the world. He is one of the biggest brands for music in India and entire globe. He has won the Oscars award for music in the film Slumdog Millionaire. Now world famous musician and singer AR Rahman has set up an online store that will sell sound tracks from his international films like international films like Slumdog Millionaire, The Lord of the Rings, Bombay Dreams Elizabeth etc. This online music store is called “A R Rahman Store”. In this online store you can purchase the online quality music only in the currency of Canadian Dollars, Euros, British Pounds and US dollars. Soon you can buy tickets for AR Rahman live concerts straight from the online shop.

New Year 2010 Online Gifts store

In the today world E-Shop is the fast growing business. It is the process consumers go through to purchase products or services over the Internet. Its can be called by different names like online shop, eshop, e-store, internet shop, web shop, web store, online store, or virtual store. In simple term it is the process of buying goods and services from sellers who sell on the Internet. Shoppers can visit web stores from the comfort of their homes and shop as they sit in front of the computer.
Online Shops – New trends of shopping

In this online shop currently you can purchase seven items but them promises to expand the inventory to include exclusive live concern tickets, DVDs and more. In this online music store you can purchase any song in the range from USD 12.49 to USD 22.99.

Shops with AR Rahman music Online Shop

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