Ecommerce success hinges on the right kind of software for your business, and shopping cart software effects whether or not you can even do competitive e-retail business at all. It not only stores order information and customer data, but also interfaces with order fulfillment and inventory management systems and maintains product data in real time. As with everything in ecommerce, not all software is created equal, and the best shopping cart software for one company may not provide the best shopping cart functionality for your website.
Here is a run-down on what to consider when you’re in the market for shopping cart software. Shopping cart reviews are available online at multiple places.
What level of customization are you looking for? Shopping carts like Shopify and BigCommerce give you easy ways to modify the look and feel of your webstore in just a few clicks. They don’t require any coding skills to customize your webstore.
At the other extreme are open source shopping cart software. Rather than customizing by point and click, these packages allow you to modify the code, or even add new features to them. Yes, that takes deep expertise on the inner workings of the platform, and quite a bit of programming experience.
The needs of your website and your comfort level with coding are the determining factors in deciding which way to go. How many websites are you incorporating now, and will you expand the number in the near future?
The next big question is – What kind of shopping cart experience are you looking to provide for your customer?
For example, Zappos.com has shopping cart software that sends automatic emails to the customer if they let items sit in their cart for too long. Whereas, Amazon’s shopping cart software allows the items to sit indefinitely in the cart, while also notifying the user of price and inventory changes on the cart’s page.
Not only do you want the shopping experience to be easy for the customer, you want it to be hassle free on your end too. Shopping cart software synthesizes a big chunk of data. So make sure your shopping cart software includes:
- Good hosting services included in the package. Fully hosted systems like BigCommerce and Shopify take away all the hosting headaches from you.
- Easy payment processing with tax calculator included
- Solid security for both you and your customer data
Take the time to select the best shopping cart software for your website, and you won’t be disappointed in the results, and neither will your customers.