Seo, Make Money Online and Technology

Here are some criteria that are important when it comes to picking a shopping cart:

* Calculate Shipping & Tax
This is one of the reasons why you have a shopping cart. It’s a basic function, but some do it better than others. Make sure you have several options on how to calculate basic shipping charges. Don’t forget, some customers will want fast shipping like Fed Ex. Can the cart handle this?

* Soft & Hard Goods
This is extremely important for anyone who wants to sell informational products. A hard good is a physical product that has to be shipped to the customer. A soft good is a downloadable product or software type of product. You want the shopping cart to be able to handle both types of products in the same transaction so the customer doesn’t have to go through the ordering process twice if ordering one of your widgets and a downloadable E-book at the same time. Also, when the cart is delivering a downloadable product it should generate a webpage for the download that disappears automatically after a short time so that customer can’t give the link to all his/her friends.

* Featured Products
These are products that you can add to the bottom of the shopping cart checkout page that your customers may also be interested in purchasing. A powerful shopping cart will let you add additional items you may want to push to your customers. Adding text such as “people who bought this item also bought these products” or “you may also be interested in . . . “ will give customers additional choices that they may be interested in. This can mean a lot more money for you.

* Related Products
A sophisticated shopping cart will automatically make additional product suggestions based on the item they are purchasing. Related products are similar in nature to the main items the customer is purchasing and gives your customer choices that they can quickly add to the cart at check out for a powerful upselling feature.
Just like the graphic above your “related products” would be listed right below the cart.

* Product Descriptions
Make sure your choice of shopping cart will give you the options of making long and short descriptions of your products at checkout. A short description is a title of your product and a long description will give additional details to your customers to influence their buying decision. Make the long description “salesy” to push your products and convince your customers to buy. These descriptions also help to combat “shopping cart abandonment” because they help keep the customer excited about their purchase i.e. they complete the transaction instead of loading up the cart and leaving.

* Inventory
A great feature every shopping cart should have is the ability to alert you when your product inventory is getting low. If you happen to run out of a certain product, the cart will give the customer an option to “backorder” the item and gives you a chance to keep selling while restocking your inventory.

* Customizable “Continue Shopping” Pages
Where you send your customers after they add a particular item to their shopping cart can mean a big difference in the amount of money they spend with you. Sophisticated shopping carts allow you to customize the “Continue Shopping” button so it takes the customer to a related product of your choice. This one feature can dramatically influence whether the customer simply checks out because it’s too difficult to find related items, or purchases something else because you made it easy.

You should also be able to eliminate the continue shopping button. Why would you want to do that? If you have an expensive item in the cart you may not want people to get distracted by searching around your other less expensive products. They may find something cheaper and delete the expensive product or they may take so long looking at other stuff that they never get around to completing the sale in the cart. THAT HURTS!