A great web design team can not only give you a professional, functional website for your business, but they can help you choose the best shopping cart. The key here is they can help you. Do not leave all the major decisions up to them. The best kind of shopping cart for your website is determined by several factors, some of which your web developer may not be familiar with.
A great programming team will not only present you with several options, but do not settle until you have considered the following factors.
The Business Model Determines the Cart Model
How well does your programmer understand your business? Great web design teams often have programmers on hand who have a knack for designing functional, beautiful websites. But they do not necessarily understand how your business will work, so you have to tell them about it before they begin designing your shopping cart.
This means that they should be well-versed in your branding, marketing plan and your business goals, especially the specific goals you have for the website. Is your website purely for product display? Is it the only way you will be making sales or is an offshoot of your physical store?
Your shopping cart is not just about how pretty it may look in the future but how well it reflects the marketing plan you have set up for your business. The type of products you will carry, the customers you want to target and how you want them to pay are big considerations.
Understand the Different Kinds of Carts First
Leaving it all up to your web design team can be tempting, but at this stage you should be immersing yourself in the pros and cons of the different types of carts available. Many new ecommerce websites often go with free, open-source software when they start off, with the understanding that they can develop it as the business develops.
Different kinds of carts will cost you different amounts. A customized cart built and tested from scratch will cost you a few thousand dollars, or more. Free-to-use manual carts are also available, but these are usually simple systems without the bells or whistles.
Middle ground shopping carts are often subscription-based and need to be integrated into the website and can be customized for a monthly fee. Discuss these options with your developer. In most cases, your product inventory and budget will help you choose the type of cart.
Front-End is Different from Back-End
As the owner of the ecommerce business, you will see more than what the customers do when it comes to your choice of shopping cart. Some shopping carts will inform you if certain products are running low on stock, some send you auto-reports whenever a certain sales amount for products is reached and others can generate analytical reports to give you an idea of what items are selling quickly/slowly.
You, or an employee, will often be managing databases such as your actual inventory versus the online one and you may want the ability to merge these databases. Front-end applications, such as multiple pictures and payment gateways are important, but consider what you want when it comes to back-end processes too. The simpler it is, the easier it will be for you to maintain.
Shopping Carts Change
The better word for it is -- they evolve. One of the best tips is not to love your shopping cart too much because it will evolve with your business. You may end up scrapping a feature you are in love with because your customers find it useless or adding more functionality as your business expands. So choose a cart you can upgrade or downgrade to your needs -- or make sure your web development team is willing to return to tweak the shopping cart a few months or years down the road.
Choose the cart that you can use
Choose a cart you can use -- if you cannot understand it, chances are your customers will not be able to use it either. Look for a cart you can figure out, even if you are a basic web surfer who does not know HTML from Java. Another way to make sure you end up with a user-friendly cart is to keep testing the system on different types of people.
his way you can figure out if there are any glitches before it even goes live. It can also give you the opportunity to change your shopping cart model before serious glitches affect your potential sales.
