There’s an elephant in the room which no one is talking about. Actually, I’m guessing many people haven’t even seen it, but it’s there. The elephant?

Should a shopping cart provider make a product which is good, or one that is profitable?

I’ve probably lost some of you already, so let me give an example. Earlier this year I setup a new shopping cart for a client, migrating from an older product. The new product had a one page checkout that was very slick indeed, so I thought, sure, let’s go with one page. A one page checkout is a feature, and so it sells more products for the shopping cart provider.

When we went live, sales plummeted. All this work, all these promises of increased sales, and what happened? I had a great big L for “loser” on my forehead! I couldn’t work it out at first. It was live for a week or two and sales were down about 30%. On a hunch, I decided to switch from one page checkout to “regular” multipage checkout. Immediately, sales went up about 50% (and order size went up as well, strangely).

In order to make a good cart, the provider would have had to spend substantial time doing user testing, working with beta testers, modifying the product, etc. They may have spent many thousands of dollars, and possibly delayed launch a few weeks. The question is: how many extra units would they have sold because of that hard work? My guess: zero.

There’s still a belief out there, buy bother shopping cart providers and ecommerce owners, that you just set things up how you want them, pump some traffic in, and the products sell themselves. The even bigger elephant in the room is: that doesn’t explain why most ecommerce sites only convert around 2% of their visitors, but some (and not just Amazon) are doing 10 - 20% conversions. There’s clearly a lot more to selling than just pumping people into a “nice” product.

What’s a shopping cart vendor to do though? Make a good cart or make a profitable one?

Like quite a few of you, I was intrigued by the announcement of the new Google browser, Chrome. Apparently a few of you were as well - Chrome has made up 2.6% of visitors on my site in the last week! I checked a few client sites, they were getting between 0.1 and 0.5%. Not bad for a first week. Still, it shows what I’ve long suspected - the users of this site are a little more sophisticated than the average user.

Anyone think Chrome will knock Firefox off its #2 spot? How about knocking IE off?

My prediction: Chrome will reach 10 - 15% in 12 months, primarily by stealing Firefox market share. It will continue to creep up, but IE will remain #1 for the forseeable  future. Still, who knows what 2 -5 years may bring.

Apologies to those who commented recently, a glitch meant I wasn’t notified of comments. All updated now. Will try and be more punctual

Also, if you have any comments or suggestions for the site, please leave a comment or email me: markb AT useyourweb DOT com. I’m about to go into another round of updates/bug fixes.

I just spent an hour or two having a play with version 3.5 of Interspire Shopping Cart. I have to say, this is the single most polished product I’ve ever used. All products have their pros and cons, but for sheer polish, from the AJAX powered search box, to the amazing design mode (click through for short video demo), this product oozes style.

Lots of nice touches like a built in logo creator (ok, not great for us all, but useful for some), very easy to use site designer, extremely easy to integrate third party products such as Google Analytics, Live Person chat, and a third party affiliates program. The CMS, while not a full blown CMS, is better than than 90+% of the shopping carts out there. Their support for product variations, and inventory tracking for product variations, is probably the best I’ve seen.

I have to admit this one has flown under my radar a bit (despite being a local company - I’m also in Sydney. Sorry Interspire!), but they are a sleeping giant. Definitely makes my short list of products to consider.

My post on Magento a while ago got a bit of interest, which wasn’t a huge surprise. There’s a lack of well made open source shopping carts out there and so the prospect of a new player is very promising to many people.

And that’s what I thought Magento was: just another shopping cart, albiet open source. A play with Magento in the last few days has made me think otherwise.

On the surface, it does seem like just another cart. I think they’ve probably done that on purpose. Once you dig beneath the surface a bit, things start to look a bit different. Magento isn’t just another cart. This is a real enterprise application.

I don’t pretend to know Magento inside and out, but here’s four things I’ve seen so far that makes me believe that Magento has aspirations beyond competing with osCommerce and all the < $1,000 shopping carts.

1. Sophisticated themes support. Skins are skins, right? Some are easy and some are hard? Nope. Take a good look at Magento’s themeing engine. Support for theme over rides & definining templates to use at a product/category level puts it at a high level.
2. Cacheing. Lots of shopping carts have no cacheing at all, others have it implemented in a fairly crude way. Magento seems to have quite sophisticated, granular, and controllable cacheing out of the box.
3. Data integration features. Integrating with external data sources is almost inevitable in the enterprise - getting data in, or out, or both. Magento has these features built in.
4. Multiple levels of shops. Magento can support multiple shops in one install. This can be at different levels - multiple completely independent shop fronts, or more interestingly, multiple shop fronts with a shared check out.

The interesting thing is I suspect some of these features, in particular the themeing, might get a bit of backlash from the casual open source script kids who can’t understand the value of the extra complexity they need to get through to get the job done.

A few months old now, but I just saw a great feature from Product Cart. It’s an ecommerce widget.

Basically, you log into your shopping cart admin interface, generate a widget based on your requirements, featuring particular products, you can then embed that widget into third party websites - blogs, social networking applications, other websites, etc. It can also be used to include affiliate links, which I’m sure your affiliates will love.

Great feature, a good way to spread your products outside of your site. Well done to the team at Early Impact for some innovative thinking.

I’ve been chatting with Jean-Noel who is behind Shoopz, a new hosted shopping cart. It’s still well and truly beta, so I haven’t got an entry on this site yet, but it seems to be a bit different from the standard approach. He has a very visual skinning approach which is a bit different from normal (no way to rearrange boxes yet, but he assures me this is coming!)

Still quite a way from release, but one to keep an eye on, a bit of innovation is always a good way to stir up some competitive action.

Most ecommerce sites are using Adwords. I manage AdWords account on behalf of several clients. Frankly, I’ve never really liked the AdWords interface. I always dreaded going in there and, like it or not, as humans, we are less inclined to do things we hate.

I recently downloaded the Google Adwords Editor. This is a program you download to manage your adwords account(s) in (yes, it works with master accounts for those who have them, a godsend for me). You import your account in, make the changes offline, then when you are happy you sync it back up.

What’s it like? It’s amazing. Every now and then you bump into a piece of software that just works exactly how you think it should. This is one of them. No, it’s not perfect, there are a few things I’d like to change, but overall it’s wonderful. I’ve spent the last few hours over hauling the largest account I manage, and it’s been so easy to do. I’m absolutely convinced that when I go back in a few weeks time to check out the results of these changes, the client’s sales will have gone up at least 10%. I suspect if I were doing it via the web interface I wouldn’t have made quite so many tweaks, and probably not gotten as good a result.

I love it! Well done Google Adwords Editor team!

One of the frustrating things about being a new site is that new sites rank poorly in Google. This is doubly frustrating for ecommerce sites who often rely on Google organic traffic for a lot of their sales.

In the SEO community, it’s widely accepted that new domains are penalized in search engines (e.g. receive poor rankings) for approximately 6 - 8 months. There’s little that can be done about this. In fact, sometimes doing aggressive SEO work in that period can make it longer. This  is called the aging delay.

If you want to minimise this damage, the best steps are:

• Register the domain as soon as you can
• Put up a one page site, with a brief explanation as to what it is/will be. It doesn’t need a pretty design, just something basic, as long as it contains a few good keywords so Google understands what the page/domain is about.
• Get the site one or two links - beg your friend, your brother’s blog, etc. The links are so Google can discover the site and start the clock running to age your domain.

Given most sites take a few months to build, it’s a good way to minimize the painful waiting period.

As the owner of this site, I often get asked “which is the best shopping cart?”. I also hang out in a few forums where shopping cart software is frequently discussed: “what is the best shopping cart software for my new online frozen banana stand?” etc.

Well, once and for all, I’ll answer the question as to which is best:

It depends.

Sorry folks, I know you are looking for a simple answer, but there is no simple answer to complex questions. What does it depend on?

• What are you selling?
• What sort of complexity do your products have?
• What is your marketing strategy?
• What is your branding strategy?
• What are your in house technical skills like?
• What is your budget?

I talk to and consult with a lot of ecommerce owners. Everyone thinks their store is pretty normal and pretty straight forward. They aren’t. Every single customer has at least one challenge, one unique attribute to their business which I hadn’t seen before/considered before. To them, and for their business, it seems like no big deal.

There are certain shopping carts I would absolutely not recommend to anyone, and there’s a short list of 4 or 5 products which would meet the bulk of the needs of probably 80% of people without major customization. (and before I get deluged with comments saying “what is your short list?”, I’m afraid I won’t blog it as I do need to keep a certain level of neutrality as owner of this site).

The most important thing (which I’m sure Scott blogged about sometime but I can’t find it)  is to “work on your  shop, not on your shopping cart”.