Your business might already be set up with a mini-site and Paypal or other financial payment button. But often website shoppers might be getting lost as the site changes over to the processing institution’s software system, different site look and navigation upon checking out. However, there is a solution. You could have more enhanced processing features and options and even extend your sales reach with a shopping cart system.
Shopping cart software today has a variety of tools to help with your marketing and sales. For example, some carts allow you to build your own virtual showroom with the help of a wide range of templates and layouts that coordinate with your website. Such a powerful web presentation often results in increased activity and sales due to a much smoother transition from shopping to checking out. Thus with your own cart, you can not only offer a better processing look, you can monitor activity to see if you lose people due to navigation and other issues and revise as needed on our own.
With a shopping cart, you also have more freedom to set up customized messages and immediately have customers entered into your database and accounting systems. Whereas with financial options like Clickbank and Paypal, you need to set up a special bridge to get people to subscribe to your autoresponder somehow, doing a 2-step or missing out on lead captures altogether.
Other Enhanced Cart Features
Once people have stepped into your online show room, they might enjoy viewing your products that can be bundled together with shopping cart software. You can upload digital images along with some copywriting or short classified spots to make your products more attractive, too, inside the shopping area so that shoppers can view a particular product by zooming in and out, with the help of an interactive image viewer.
And for shoppers making their selections who would like multiple purchase options to send a gift to someone, you can find tools for this with shopping cart software. Plus you can also introduce shipping orders such as UPS plus coupon systems.
You can also offer multiple payment options to your clients so that they can pay you online through via credit cards without Paypal, for those who don’t have access to it in their countries or for other reasons. Plus you could offer offline credit card processing when Internet or phone land-lines may be down or for cell phone callers or fax clients by heading to eBay and picking up an inexpensive swipe machine and / or adjusting your shopping cart software to process offline transactions.
Shopping carts also allow you to monitor the status of your business in real time. So you can keep a track of any transactions between your enterprise and the clients. And you can learn when an order is placed, the status of the order and whether the order has been delivered. You can use cart software to find out the sales updates from the sales reporting tools, integrate your sales and order- related info with QuickBooks for easy accounting and your products to list in eBay auctions for another money-making avenue, and import and export your whole customer database for your records.
So give your customers the feeling of shopping in a supermarket, an online supermarket. Let them browse, select products add them to their shopping cart and place an order via multiple ways.
The easier and more fun it is for your shoppers, the more likely they’ll return – and tell their friends. Keep your customer satisfaction in mind when you plan those Paypal buttons on mini-sites. And learn more about shopping carts plus get help setting yours up at http://movingaheadcarts.com 24/7.
Diana Barnum
http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/online-shopping-solutions-with-carts-119949.html
Recommend Open Source Online Shopping Cart Software I Can Install or Use in Dreamweaver CS3?
I’m looking to establish an online shopping cart but I don’t want a hosted solution (where the hosting company provides software). I prefer to install the software on my website using a PHP, MySQL solution. Some features I need is the ability to upload files (PDFs, photos, etc) and also digital downloads. Can someone recommend a list of open source software out there for this as well as any plugins that work with Dreamweaver CS3, thanks!
I have always liked osCommerce:
http://www.oscommerce.com/
References :
Stay away from osCommerce and it’s sister project, ZenCart. They are popular, but they are a nightmare to customize. If you go this route, you will end up having to keep track of changes you made to several dozen files. It’s a major headache, and as a software engineer, my impression when modifying ZenCart for a client was, "how in the world can anyone work like this?"
For a product that is not only stable and feature-rich, but also has an elegance of design and a large support community, check out the Drupal content management system and it’s excellent eCommerce add-in module. Both are open-source and both are free….
http://drupal.org
http://drupal.org/project/ecommerce
NOTE: Don’t use the latest version (version 6) which was just released. eCommerce for that version is still under testing and not ready for production sites yet. Grab version 5.7 instead.
I use Dreamweaver in conjunction with Drupal to design custom themes and program modules for added functionality. But as to that, all the requirements you’ve listed, Drupal and eCommerce can do out-of-the-box.
References :
I would recommend BlingCart, It is a PHP shopping cart software that is completely customizable with a WYSIWYG interface. This is a new software that just recently got released. You should check it out at: http://www.blingcart.com
I am personally a webmaster and have used this software to make some popular ecommerce sites.
You can contact the owner of blingcart at webmaster@blingcart.com, Tell them Steve sent you and he will give you a good discount.
References :
http://www.blingcart.com