As a business owner, setting up a shopping cart is a momentous moment, full of pride and thoughts about how far you have come. There are many shopping cart solutions that allow you to quickly integrate the software into your website, so your customers are just a click away. But before you take down the site for a few days of maintenance and integrate your software, make sure you have checked the following off your list.
Completed Product Inventory
By now, you have probably gone through the stages of choosing the best type of shopping cart for the products you carry and for your business model. Now you just have to make sure that your products are readily available and easy to add to the shopping cart. Make sure that your customer can navigate easily between browsing products, adding to cart and checking out. This way you ensure a user-friendly experience that transitions between selling and buying without a glitch.
A completed product inventory is a must for a shopping cart that is driven by your existing database. The connections between both should be seamless -- without one the other will not work correctly.
The Numbers
Before you integrate the shopping cart software, make sure you have the site numbers that you need to do a business comparison later on. Remember, even your shopping cart needs to justify its business existence and you need before and after numbers to calculate your ROI.
So, before you place that cart in, generate the necessary reports you need in terms of site hits, traffic, product movement and conversions. This way you can justify the shopping cart expense later on and know if your investment was a good move or not.
Payment Gateway Compatibility
Make sure your chosen cart software works with your chosen payment gateways and that this has been thoroughly tested by your professional web development team. A faulty payment gateway can result in lost sales, angry customers and more expenses for your business.
Testing your payment gateway compatibility before integrating or launching your software saves you time and money. Many partner banks and services charge a fee for charge backs or fees that have to be returned in the event customers are not happy with the sale. A faulty payment gateway can prevent charges from going through or worse, allow charges to go through even if they are not authorized by the customer. This can result in a lot of bad news, bad reviews and worst of all, bad business.
Code Compatibility
Some carts will simply refuse to work on your website because your base code and its base programming run on different or conflicting platforms. This can result in a lot of error messages, especially if you migrate an existing shopping cart program into your existing website.
This is often an error committed by well-meaning ecommerce owners who simply sign-up for a service then place the code into the website. Before you do so, make sure you consult with a professional design team first to ensure that the service you select is compatible with your site.
Your Site Performance
Before launching your shopping cart, your web development team should make sure it does not negatively affect site performance and speed. Some shopping carts can bog down your site and force slower loading times, which in turn can make you lose even established customers who are used to a different server speed or degree of service.
Make sure your cart smoothly integrates into your site performance. Ensuring this can mean upping bandwidth, fixing the programming, compressing content, caching assets or even just updating the content management system.
A shopping cart can make a difference in your conversions and product movement, as well as make your site more user-friendly and efficient. This is if your know how to use it wisely and if it fits your business model perfectly. And these are but a few of the considerations you should make.
In general shopping carts mean better business, but make sure you do it properly.
