5 Worst ways to pick a Shopping Cart
Picking a good shopping cart can be a make or break deal for your online
business. If you choose the wrong software, you might be stuck with some
software that’s hard to manage, hard to configure, or that doesn’t grow as your
business does. But no one said choosing a shopping cart was easy. There’s an
enormous range of choices, and it’s pretty hard to work out what’s good and
what’s bad. Obviously, www.shopping-cart-reviews.com helps you come up with a
short list, but how do you then pick the tool to base your e-commerce success
on? Here’s 4 things you shouldn’t do!
1. Don’t plan your site
How many projects have you work on where at the end you’ve said “you know, we
spent too much time planning this”? If you’re anything like me, you’ve never
said that! Unless you understand how your business will work and how you will
sell online, you won’t be able to make an informed decision. Here’s a hint:
it’ll take more than an hour to work it out. Planning is hard work, but it’ll
pay off – big time.
2. Don’t involve your techies
If you are a business person using some technical folk or web designers to help
you out, not getting them involved will help bring on certain failure. Setting
up a shopping cart well is a lot of work. If the cart you choose is hard to
adapt to your existing design, or is incompatible with the rest of your site,
you’ll end up with something second rate or spending many dollars getting your
techies to sort out the problems.
3. Get your techies too involved
Am I contradicting point 2? Nope. The other side of the coin is letting your
business be driven by technology. You might have the world’s best technology and
nicest site, but if it doesn’t allow you to run the shop the way you want it’ll
hurt your sales. The challenge is finding a balance between the business and
the technology. The business is king, but the technology can dethrone that king
pretty quick, so make sure you keep things in balance!
You might have the world’s best technology and nicest site, but if it doesn’t allow you to run the shop the way you want it’ll hurt your sales.
4. Don’t worry about the search engines till later
Some online shops are lucky enough to have a niche audience which allow them to
get customers via community sites, or perhaps newsletters, etc. The rest of us
are dependant at least in part on people finding us in the search engines. So,
if the search engines are so important, don’t leave them till later – make them
a part of your planning from day one.
Shopping carts are complex pieces of software, and depending on how they are
created, search engines will sometimes have troubles crawling them. I don’t know
about you, but if I’m selling 100 products on my site, I want all 100 to be in
Google, not just a few. How do you make sure this happens? First, check out what
the shopping cart company says – do they claim their site is easily crawled by
Google? If they do, that’s a great start. Check a couple of their sample
customer sites (we list 3 sample customer sites for most shopping carts on
www.shopping-cart-reviews.com).
Here’s what you do next: go to a customer site, find one of their products, copy
and paste the URL into Google and do a search on it. If Google comes back with:
Google can show you the following information for this URL:
Show Google's cache of
www.someshop.com/someproduct.php
Then that’s a good sign. If Google says
Sorry, no information is available for the URL
www.someshop.com/someproduct.php
That’s a bad sign. Make sure you check out a few sample sites to make sure it’s
not just one customer who has set up their site badly or is brand new.
If the search engines don’t like your shopping cart there are workarounds, but
it’s more work.
5. Avoid all Shopping Carts that don’t have unlimited free support
“I’ve paid $500 for this shopping cart, why should I pay another $50 to get help
with it?”
Most shopping carts are complex pieces of software, and there’s always going to
be something all but the most experienced techie struggles with. Paying for
support is important for the company making the shopping cart in order to be
able to keep working. Otherwise, they’d sell a few hundred copies and then spend
the rest of their time supporting their existing customers for free!
You don’t always need to pay for support – most shopping carts have a customer
support forum where you can ask help from other users. Sometimes the developers
of the shopping cart will pitch in and answer for free as well. There’s also a
good chance someone has had the same problem, so see if the forums has a search
function, or if the developers have a knowledge base you can search.
In my opinion, the fairest model for all is having some limited initial support
including in the price of the shopping cart to give you some basic assistance to
get up and going, and then paid support after that – in addition to a free
customer forum of course
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