Today’s guest blogger is Roko Nastic, contributing author and editor at WebmasterFormat.com, place where webmasters can quickly and easily gather all the necessary info to develop successful websites and to find the best web hosting provider.

If you have an ecommerce site, you need a shopping cart that keeps up with the times. Your shopping cart can literally make or break a sale, so make sure that yours is effective, easy to use, and has the features that you need.

Most of us who are active Internet shoppers have war stories to tell about the “shopping cart from hell” we experienced on some ecommerce site. You know how it goes. You click “Add to Cart” and you’re immediately whisked there, even though you’re not done yet. So you try to get back and keep shopping but you can’t get out. You’re trapped in your own cart and try as you might – you can’t see the expected “Continue Shopping” button so you panic and hit your browser’s back button. Later you discover you’ve wiped out your original choice. And then there are those sites where you need to click a “Buy” button to place an item in the cart, even though you’re not yet sure you’re ready to buy. Or the site where you can’t figure out shipping costs until you’ve entered your credit card number. Finally there are those maddening sites where you click “Add to Cart” and you can’t tell whether anything has happened or not. Where’s the visual indication “Your Cart Has Been Updated?” And so it goes.

What You Don’t Want: Abandoned Carts

There are a lot of studies done on “abandonment” rates – where shoppers with items in a cart flee the site without buying. No one knows for sure why but many think the quality of the whole shopping cart process may be a contributing factor. If you’re new to the game you’re going to have to decide whether you want to buy a pre-packaged shopping cart software package or have your web site designers build a custom one for you. It is an important decision. What should you be looking for?

Getting Ideas from Top Sites

Visit a few ecommerce sites against which you compete and test them out. List what you like and don’t like. Perhaps they have features you hadn’t considered in your business plan, like discount coupons. They can be an effective tool so perhaps you should consider adding them. Some businesses, like parts supply outlets, can make do with “bare bones” shopping carts that simply allow you to order the needed part and be on your way. However, the vast majority of ecommerce sites sell related products and some carts can include suggested additional items. For the best example of this, go to Amazon. Their shopping cart program has just about every feature known to man! Does that mean every ecommerce site needs a shopping cart procedure as extensive as Amazon’s? Some feel theirs is one of the best out there and their impressive sales performance would seem to support that contention. Others feel it is cumbersome and intrusive. They extend “up-selling” to the point the shopper can be overwhelmed with potential choices. What are some of the features that make Amazon’s shopping cart both effective and ineffective at the same time?

Overkill

Whether or not you have an Amazon account, when you put an item in the cart you end up on a page loaded with suggestions for more stuff to buy. And for those with accounts, the page is even more loaded up with stuff, based on browsing history. Generally this “up selling” is a good practice but it can be overwhelming and irritating to some customers. If you have a dog products site and a customer adds a collar to the shopping cart it’s a great idea to have the capability to display leashes. But dumping dog bowls, bones, beds, and flea shampoo may be overkill.

Some Musts

Amazon has customer reviews on products and it is perhaps their most powerful feature. Depending on the products you sell, customer reviews can significantly increase the chances of getting a sale. In today’s Internet environment people are paid to write reviews for some sites, regardless of whether they have used the product or not. Savvy customers can see through this, so don’t do it. Amazon also has a “wish list” feature where you can store items you’re only thinking about purchasing. Their checkout procedure is painless, but they don’t calculate shipping until you’ve entered your payment method, which some buyers simply will not do. Calculating shipping costs are a must for those shoppers who are comparing an online purchase with a purchase from a “brick and mortar” retail outlet.

You Get What You Pay For

So just how much “shopping cart” do you need? Avoid the temptation to go cheap and remember you may want to add features as your business grows. Although there are free shopping carts out there, you often get what you pay for. You can check the Internet for reviews of the many competitive vendors that have pre-packaged shopping cart software. Some offer varying levels of customization. This can be vital as you don’t want to use a shopping cart whose graphical representation is drastically different from the rest of your site. Perhaps the best source for you is old fashioned “word of mouth.” Let your friends, neighbors, relatives, and business associates know you are launching an ecommerce site or are considering changing your shopping cart software if your site is already up. With a little bit of luck, you might come across someone who has experience with a shopping cart software vendor. Finally, check with your local Chamber of Commerce for a list of businesses in your area with ecommerce sites. Many business owners are more than happy to share their experiences.

I’ve been chatting with Igor from Shopping Cart Elite recently. He’s got a product which seems to stand out from the “me too” of many of the products on the market. Some of the more innovative features include:

• A competition spy module, to watch prices on your competitor sites
• Some pretty sophisticated SEO features. Virtually all shopping carts on the market claim to have SEO features, but I’ve yet to encounter a cart which is 100% SEO optimized out of the box.
• Some thorough back office functions such as full inventory management, employee rights and task assignments, and an accounting module.

It’s also got a CRM (customer relationship management) module, which can save a lot of time, making tasks such as support emails with canned responses, supplier inventory integration, and an RMA (return merchandise authorization) module.

Another time saver and revenue generator is the ability to automatically post your inventory to your eBay store and Amazon Marketplace, as well as Google Marketplace. With eBay it claims to even research the competition and automatically suggest an optimized price point to sell at! How’s that for a time saver.

There’s some Shopping Cart Elite educational videos on YouTube to give you more of an idea about the features. Shopping Cart Elite is a hosted solution with a range of price points.

This blog post was partly sponsored by Shopping Cart Elite Review – Best eCommerce Choice

This is a guest blog post by Sandra from thinkingmoney.org.

With low overheads, the online business game is very competitive. In order to obtain success in this marketplace it is essential that you are aware that there are many things involved in having an eCommerce site.

As with any business venture, you’ll need to know your product inside out, who your target audience is and how you intend to sell to them. This will help yours marketing: it’s not all about presenting eye catching content anymore; being a pretty site does not help increase conversions.

Internet marketers are raving about CRO of late (Conversion Rate Optimisation). It’s all very well having a site, and the ability to purchase things from it, but the most important factor is actually getting people to buy from you. eCommerce sites cost a lot of money to setup well, accept credit cards deals in very techy and intricate coding. So you’d want people to actually buy right?

The first thing to do is establish what you want to sell and where you want the potential client to go. You will need well written content, with SEO anchor text, and persuasive language used. For this you may want to use a freelance writer who has experience.

The customer has to clearly understand what you can do for them; your USP’s will play a vital role. Clear calls to action will make a difference, if in doubt then test and test again. Once you learn the basics, it’s quite easy to test different colors and different positions on the page.

P.S. don’t forget to set up an analytics program on your site! Find out where your users are coming from and when they are leaving your site, and lots more insightful data!

One Step Checkouts are all the rage with shopping carts at the moment. The default Magento checkout process can be a bit long-winded.

The rather appropriately named “One Step Checkout” is, as you might guess, a one step checkout add on for Magento. The standard version is €190 (it’ll be good enough for most) and the enterprise at €590. On a shop of any size, even a small increase in conversion rate will pay that back quickly and many times over.

The only caution I have is if at all possible, do an A/B split test on the checkout. While one page checkouts are all the rage with shop owners, my own tests and tests of others I’ve worked with has shown that they sometimes decrease, not increase conversions. However, every site is different, so experiment away!

Mac users would be very likely familiar with Parallels software which allows them to run a virtual Windows environment on their Mac. Parallels also do a range of other virtualisation products including the Parallels Small Business Panel. This allows webhosts to easily deploy and manage large numbers of VPS and dedicated servers.

Pinnacle Cart can now be deployed directly from Parallels, making setup super easy. Should be a great opportunity for customers using a Parallels managed hosting service to get up super fast.

I recently heard about an interesting product that allows you to embed your products into a facebook page. ShopTab is a facebook app that will display products from your online store in your facebook fan page, and allow people to click the buy now button and link directly to your store.

You can find out more at http://www.facebook.com/ShopTabApp

As expected, Varien, the makers of Magento, have announced their enterprise edition. You can see the differences between the standard and enterprise versions. This is no surprise, and I believe they’ve mentioned they would do this in time. I’ve always found Magento a bit odd. It’s always felt like more of an enterprise level product to me. Many of the features are too rich and too complex, and the hardware requirements too high for the average small shop which is the typical audience of open source products. The product has had enterprise aspirations, yet the bulk of the users have been low end who want something quicker and easier. I’m curious to see what the enterprise uptake is like. Mind you, I can’t see them hitting the really high end of town, but it’s an interesting offering for the mid range, those doing maybe $10m – $200m/year in revenue (pulling those figures off the top off my head without too much thought).

A shameless plug. My Dad had CLL (Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia) and against all odds beat it using diet. This is a blatant plug/link juice for his site on CLL (Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia).

I’m a Google Analytics junkie. I admit it. I just love the product. However, despite my desire to procreate with it, it does have some significant limitations. One of those limitations has just been removed.

Ever wanted to know keyword trends? Which keywords are having unusual spikes or dips? I sure do. You can now get a keyword trends report in Google Analytics courtesy of this groovy little greasemonkey script. I love it!

You can follow me on Twitter if you are into that Mostly talking about general online marketing stuff with an ecommerce bent.