So you want to expand your horizons and sell your goods online? Or perhaps your start-up business intends to be online-only and not have a bricks-and-mortar outlet. Either way, you are likely to need that most common (but sometimes bewildering) web application, the shopping cart.

Shopping carts have been around almost as long as the world-wide web, and there is a huge range that varies in cost, features, skills required, and ease of use. If you approach a web developer, chances are that they will regularly use and be familiar with only one or two systems – which may not meet your needs particularly well.

WebFarm offers a number of shopping carts to meet your business needs.  In this article, we will pose a series of questions that will help you narrow your choice.

Shopping carts 101 – a refresher course.

You are no doubt familiar with the basic experience of online shopping from the consumer’s point of view. If not, go shopping on a wide range of sites and explore the customer experience, taking note of the good and the bad. Many cart providers have a gallery of sites using their software, which can give a better insight to their product than just their demo site.

The basic elements of a shopping cart system are:

Your shopping cart shopping list

How many products do you have?

If it is 10 or so, you will get away with a minimal system – even with individually-coded product pages. With an extensive range of products, some sort of database system which manages products and generates product pages is needed.

How often do your products change?

If they don’t, let your answer to number 1 stand. But if you have a small range of products which change frequently, you need a system which will make it simple to update products, upload new photographs etc.

How flexible is the category system?

Some shopping carts only let you place a product in one place in a hierarchy of categories. This is limiting, as your customers may not think in the same way as you. For example, one customer might want to compare all products which are blue. A system which allows multiple categories increases your customers’ chances of finding what they are looking for.

Is the nature of your product such that each customer will only buy one?

If so, you might not need a basket system, just a “buy now” button. For example, if you sell an English language course for speakers of Portuguese and another one for speakers of Japanese, the odds are pretty overwhelming that each customer will only buy one product.

Are your products simple, or do they have a lot of options?

Clothes typically have lots of options, for example a top might come in 5 sizes and 4 colours. Since things like price and shipping weight are the same, it is easier to manage a single product rather than 20. In shopping cart lingo, things like size and colour are referred to as attributes, and good carts handle multiple attributes. And of course you might need to be able to set size 12 in green as temporarily out of stock, or to run a special on black only.

Who do you sell to?

While the majority of shopping carts are used for retailing to end-consumers (B2C), a shopping cart can be of help even if you are in the business-to-business (B2B) sector, allowing your customers to place orders with minimal handling. You won’t need a payment gateway, but you will need a system with a good “my account” section so your customers can monitor the purchase process.

Is your product digital?

On the surface, digital products such as software or media content look simpler, as there is no shipping involved, but not all shopping cart systems have support for digital products. What is needed is a method for securing the product against “discovery” and downloading by people who have not paid for it, while still making it easy for the purchaser to download their product.

Where is your market?

If you are primarily selling to New Zealand, an order form where “State” and “Zip Code” are compulsory data fields is going to deter your customers greatly. A lot of systems are developed in America and tend to be americocentric. Make sure that the system is sufficiently configurable. The option to ship internationally also adds a lot of complexity.

One time customers, or returning?

Once again, it is the nature of your products (and possibly the quality of your service!) which determines whether most customers will only ever purchase from you once, or whether repeat sales are likely. If the latter, having an account system makes those return purchases much simpler for the customer. It should be noted however, that requiring the creation of an account before revealing basic information such as price is decidedly unfriendly and may drive potential customers away.

Is the flow good?

With some products you might expect or experience that customers often buy several items from a category. Thus it is good if the cart returns the customer to the category after an item is added to the basket. It is also important to the customer experience that the system clearly indicates what it has done. Otherwise, puzzled customers become frustrated customers if they find they now have eight widgets in their basket when they wanted two.

Inventory system

Simple shopping carts assume that you have unlimited inventory. If your product is digital, this is true, so its not a problem, but for a store selling physical goods, managing inventory levels is one of the toughest challenges, particularly if you sell limited editions or if resupply times are long. High-end systems will integrate with your inventory management software so that your website always knows how many items you have in stock.

Web Developer or DIY?

Some systems make product management easy but require html/css or php skills in order to customise the look. Others have quite a range of pre-made or third-party templates to choose from and install. If you are using a popular system, remember that there will be an awful lot of sites using the default ‘skin’. Looking distinctive is an advantage! And remember, a carefully considered hand-crafted product page can often convert a lot more potential customers into sales than a basic page generated from a product database.

What Promotional Features do you want?

There are many ways to structure discounts, promotions and incentives, and a good system will give you the option to implement at least a few of them. Some examples: Enter a code from a mail campagn or coupons you gave out at a trade show, free shipping on orders over $100 this week, buy 3 items from this category and get the cheapest free.

Which Upsell Features do you need?

Many carts feature options to promote related products, either based on what others have bought or on your recommendations. Other possibilities for increasing the value of the transaction include gift wrapping, cards, personalisation etc.

Can it make your life easier?

A shopping cart integrated with a payment gateway can collect a lot of the accounting information you need, so it’s a decided bonus if it can export it to your accounting software rather than you having to re-enter it all.

Who needs Backup?

You do! Some simple systems merely email the details to you when an order is placed, but this isn’t really enough, as unlike the Pony Express the mail doesn’t always get through. So storing order details in a database is vital. Also vital is the means to back up all the data you have entered to your store. Your hosting provider probably backs up your site, but these backups are seldom guaranteed, and regularly maintaining your own off-site backups greatly reduces the risk of catastrophic data loss.

Is Vendor Lock-in a Risk?

Opting for a system with a large user base world-wide increases the portability of your site should you ever decide to move to another hosting provider. Counterbalancing this is the probability that the host may give much better support for a system developed in-house.