Ten years ago, many of the organization selling goods and services online would have represented their ecommerce software as a “shopping cart.” At present, changes in software development could carry that word back.
Shopping cart software (which is also known as ecommerce platform or solution) is a software service that allows the businessman to sell products online. Basically, with shopping cart software, you can create an online store.
Why is shopping cart software essential?
Shopping cart software bridges the gap between the seller and buyer, so having the best shopping cart software is extremely important for your ecommerce website. A good shopping cart software typically has the following three common aspects:
- It stores product information
- It's a doorway for customer, catalog, and order management
- It provides product data and site information for user display
What options are there in the shopping cart software?
If you are on the lookout for the right shopping cart software, it's important to know that there are two basic types of carts:
Hosted Shopping Carts:
hosted shopping cart is a form of Software as a Service (Saas) model. In the hosted solution, the service user pays a constant monthly fee for access to the software. Here, users can’t get their preferred web server configuration or modify or customize the platform. These ecommerce platforms are often easy for entrepreneurs to begin with since a readymade hosting setup is already provided. Also, the shop-owners with minimum technical knowledge can avoid any hassles in creating their online store.
Licensed Shopping Carts:
The licensed shopping carts is, in reality, the software that can be installed on whatever of the servers. This is mostly used by the people as they own the permit after they purchase it. A more advanced merchant generally enjoys the freedom associated with a licensed cart, which can often lend itself to healthier user experience and maybe a little expensive overall.
In this era of heavy competition, where trillions of websites are trying their level best to attract traffic and sales, online shopping has become ubiquitous for any online business model. Even though it is possible for an ecommerce website to sell its products without actually having a full-fledged shopping cart software, this has many disadvantages and ultimately proves worthless to the business owner. On the other hand, by simply opting for a shopping cart software to create your online store, not only you make it a profitable venture but it also attracts customers to stay mesmerized on a user-friendly site.
Common Features to look for in an Online Shopping cart Software
It can be a challenge to determine which features you’ll need from your eCommerce solution before you really begin selling. Every shopping cart software comes with a diverse feature set, but they tend to be identical in the categories of features they offer.
Here are a few things you should look for when you seek out an online shopping cart software.
Ease of Use: world’s best software is useless if you don’t know how to use it. Try a free trial of each platform you’re considering and test it out to make sure the admin panel makes sense to you.
Unlimited Products: every shopping cart software will offer unlimited everything, but it sure is nice to not have to worry about exceeding your plan’s limits.
Complex Discount Features: Select the suitable software that allows you create a flat rate and percentage discounts. You should be able to apply those discounts to your entire store or a specific category or product. Moreover, opt for software that enables you to set the maximum number of times customers can avail your coupon offers.
Email Marketing Features: Most of the software platform lets you create and send emails directly from the admin panel. So, it is good to integrate your store with an email marketing service like MailChimp to automate more complex email campaigns.
Inventory Management Features: It is the out-of-stock products than disappoints your customer more than anything else. Therefore, make sure your inventory always stays up-to-date with the help of built-in inventory management features.
Shipping Options: for the ability to integrate your platform with shipping carriers (USPS, UPS, FedEx). This will let you automatically calculate actual shipping rates.
Tax Calculator: A built-in tax calculator helps you ensure that you’re collecting the correct sales tax rate from every customer.
International Language and Currency Support: If you want to sell globally, these are the features you have to look for as they allow you to sell across boundaries.
Reporting Tools: For every store, analytics and reporting tools are necessary. They reveal your site’s traffic, order totals, conversion rates, overall sales, and more.
SEO Tools: For every product page, you should be able to add metadata and SEO-related factors. It is equally important if you have the ability to write custom URLs and create a .xml sitemap as well.
Try Before You Buy
Choosing a shopping cart software is a huge commitment. So, before you put any money into the ecommerce platform, always test out the list of prospective software and their functions. Make sure you’re comfortable with basic functions. You should also take the time to test out your options like vendor’s technical support to ascertain that you’ll be able to find answers to all of your future questions.
Choosing the best shopping cart software for your growing business
Purchase Commerce is a Ready-to-Use, Easy-to-Handle, Powerful and Professional Shopping Cart Software.
If you are on the lookout for the right shopping cart for your business, compare your needs to the features offered by various shopping cart software builders. Also, carry out in-depth analysis to know how easy the software is to use because features are no good if you can't make use of them!
