MarketQwest Associates

One of the first choices a new eMerchant will have to make is the selection of a shopping cart.

To a new eMerchant, this can  be a daunting task as there are an incredible number of choices. Practical eCommerce Magazine currently counts over 500 shopping cart packages, up from 350 just two years ago.

Shopping cart software ranges from free to thousands of dollars,  from do-it-yourself toolkits to complete turnkey solutions each with dizzying array of  claims, features, and options.

So, faced with a smörgåsbord a mile long, and told that we can only make one selection, and it is a selection that we are going to have to live on for several years (at least) how do we make the choice?

In this article, we’ll lay down some foundations.  I am going to talk about what shopping cart software is, what it does, and some of the major options.

Over the next couple of articles, I am going  to present some guidelines for selecting a shopping cart, along with a few personal preferences.  Every situation is different, and their are positives and negatives for any choice you might make.  In other words, I’ll talk about my experience, but Your Mileage May Vary.

Just what is shopping cart software? At its simplest, shopping cart software can be thought of as your electronic cash register. The shopping cart allows your customer to select, purchase, and pay for items from your online store.  Shopping cart software has to record the following.

• Which product(s) your customer is purchasing (including options such as size, or color
• Whatever information is required for fulfillment, such as address, email address, etc
• The price of all items purchased
• Taxes
• Shipping charges (as well as shipping method)
• Payment method, including credit card number

The shopping cart software then connects to the payment gateway (more on payment gateways in a  later post) gets authorization or payment,  and transmits the completed order to you, and confirmation to the customer.  Here is a quick outline of the process

The core functionality of any shopping cart is the checkout process.  EVERY shopping cart has to, at a minimum let the customer select products, pay for them, and get you enough information to fulfill the order.  But most shopping carts do way more than that.  So, let’s look at what else they do.

Content Management. Most, but not all, shopping carts also manage the store’s content, including product and category pages, as well as other pages such as “About Us”, “Contact”, or “Frequently Asked Questions”.      Some shopping carts manage all the pages, some manage a subset, some shopping carts let you create custom pages.

Some shopping carts do not manage any of the content (the basic Paypal shopping cart is one example) In this case,  the “BUY” button will need to contain code to transmit product and price to the shopping cart.  In other words, if the content is static html, or managed by a different application, the BUY button ties the content to the shopping cart.

When we opened our first online store in 2004, that was exactly what we did.  I was unable to get the look I wanted in our shopping cart (which was and still is Miva Merchant) so I created all the product and category pages in static HTML and inserted “BUY” button code (taken from Miva) into the static page.  When we only had as few dozen products, this was OK, but as we expanded into hundreds of products, this became a maintenance nightmare.   We have since moved all product and category pages to the Miva content management system,

Order Fulfillment. Once a customer has placed an order, the shopping cart needs to communicate the information to you,  and to provide the customer with a confirmation.  At the simplest,  this can be an email to you and an email to your customer, with the list of products ordered, as well as shipping address.

Again, when we started, this was how we operated.  When a customer placed an order, we got an email.   We printed the email out and wrote the customer name and order number on a  piece of paper.  Later, we created shipping labels by cutting and pasting the address from the email.  Once the order was shipped, we crossed it off the list.

Many Shopping carts now have order management functions built in.  That includes assigning an order status, printing shipping labels, recoding tracking numbers, and communicating with the customer.

Another option is for the shopping cart to communicate with an outside order management system, such as Stone Edge Order Manager.

Conclusion

While the core functionality of every shopping cart system is checkout, we can already see that what we call shopping cart software can also include other functions such as content management and order fulfillment.

In future articles we;ll discuss some of these options more fully

Tags: ecommerce, internet, shopping carts, software