Shopping cart software – ctd
In our last installment, we talked a little about the basic functionality of shopping cart software.
The core 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.
Most shopping cart software does much more, ranging from content management to order fulfillment.
The functionality you need to have in your shopping cart depends on the type of products you carry, how many products you carry, how frequently they change, and how complicated the products are, and how complicated order instructions are.
For example, if you only have a few products, or if your products change infrequently, integrating a very basic shopping cart (such as Paypal) into static HTML pages may be more than adequate. One company that takes this approach is Sherwood Oaks Experimental College. (SEOC). SEOC offers screen writing classes. At any given time, they have only a few classes accepting registration. Integrating Paypal into their static HTML works adequately for them, at a very low cost.
By contrast, Kate’s Caring Gifts has over 700 active products at any given time. Many of these products have options (such as color or size), and several of them fall into multiple categories. For example, a wallet could fall into “Accessories” – or “Gifts for Men, Under $25″. Products are added, dropped, changed and suspended. Sometimes a product might become unavailable for a period of time. So, a simple “cash register” shopping cart was impractical. For Kate’s Caring Gifts, a shopping cart had to meet the following minimum requirements:
- Content Management. The shopping cart software needs to allow us to easily maintain our products. This includes all the descriptions of the products, price, weight, status, and other miscellaneous information.
- Multiple categories per product. A product such as Dropwise organic scent free lotion, could be contained in lotions, scent free body care, and, Dropwise.
- Additional Order instructions. Customers need to be able to specify gift wrap, gift messages, and add other information to their orders.
- Gift Certificates and Discount Coupons. The system had to support both
- Flexible formats. I wanted complete control of the look of the site.
- Order Management Integration. We chose Stone Edge Order Manager, and needed a shopping cart that exported orders easily
- Easy export. I needed to be able to export flatfiles with all the information needed to feed Google shopping (formerly Froogle), Amazon Ads, and other data feeds
- Support Affiliate marketing. I’ll say more about affiliates and affiliate marketing later in the series, but whatever shopping cart we chose had to provide at least basic support
- Support tracking software. Such as Google Analytics and/or Hitslink.
For Kate’s Caring Gifts, we chose Miva Merchant. Now, there are (and were) a number of possibilities, and we basically stumbled into Miva before we really had a clue what we were doing, but for a number of reasons, we are pleased with the choice, and plan to stay with it for this store.
We should note at this point that Miva Merchant, out of the box, does not support all of the required functions listed above. However, it has an open architecture, that has allowed us to extend the functionality and meet the requirements. We’ll talk more about the different architectures available in our next article.
Conclusion.
As we can see, there is a huge range of functionality available in shopping cart packages, from simple “cash registers” to complete systems with multiple options. When selecting a shopping cart, the prospective merchant should think seriously about all the needed functionality, and remove from consideration any packages that don’t meet that standard.
In our next installment, we’ll talk about how shopping cart software is sold, and the different ways that it can be built.