Ecommerce Web Design Blog

As we move into 2009, one of your new year's resolutions may have been to start the online business you have been planning for some time.  One of the key questions you will face as you start an online whop is what shopping cart software to use.  Many of the carts available in Australia tout many seemingly powerful and useful features, so how do you decide what ecommerce features will be right for your business?

Our advice to you is to try them out.  Get a piece of paper and visit the websites of your competitors. Shop around their categories and get a feel for how their pages are presented and whether as a customer you would find it easy to use their site.  How does their website design look? Would you put products in your cart? If you do put products in the cart is it easy to do? Try a few of your competitor's sites and then shop online at your favourite online shops to see how things are done in other industries. Make sure you write down the things that you particualarly like and don't. This will help you compile your list.

Once you have reviewed other shopping cart sites, try to compile a list of the 5 most important features for you.  With so many features to choose from, it will be hard to choose only 5, but this will help you compile your shortlist of websites to look at in more detail.  To help you further with your list, here is a list of some of the most commonly requested features by our customers:

• Customised web designs
• The ability to add zoomed in or enlarged product images
• Your own affiliate programme
• Wish lists
• A range of product payment methods like bank transfer, gateways (like eWay or ANZ eGate)
• A secure payment environment that meets Visa and MasterCard's PCI DSS compliance security standards

Make your site the best it can be with ozCart shopping cart add-ons
ozCart is already an ecommerce shopping cart packed with many powerful features relevant to the Australian market. Many of our customers are not aware that we also have an add-ons shop which allows you to purchase additional ecommerce features for your ozCart website. Some are installable components, others are web design and ecommerce services.

Our ozCart add-ons shop includes features that are requested by users but often specialised and may not appeal to everyone.  Some of them allow feature upgrades for older versions of our carts, where they are compatible and we have chosen to offer them (e.g. additonal payment options).

There are four sections of add ons: markting add-ons, admin section add-ons to make your shopping cart easier to manage and more powerful, sideboxes and services (like batch image resizing or Some of the great ecommere features available through the add-ons shop include the following:

• Cross Sell Booster - allowing you to specify other products to be displayed to customers when they view your products. This is not driven based on sales, you define it. This means you can manage the products that are displayed to customers to suit your own business requirements.
• Gift wrapping on checkout options
• Offer a Return Authorisation Form on your stie instead of just asking customers to contact you if they want to return a faulty product
• Lost Sales Manager - if customers come to your site, register with you, put items in their cart and then do not buy from you, how frustrating is that! This add on reports on these situations and allows you to contact these customers to find out why they didn't buy and what you can do to make them buy
• Non customer newsletter subscribers - you can send any of your customers emails directly from your site, but if you want to sign up non customers you need this add-on too. 
• Free clip on capability for the Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics applications
• Size chart creation services
• Live Help for your customers
• Product Data feeds for services like myshopping.com.au and getprice.com.au
  
• Bulk image framing and watermarking 
• Tracking stock by product variation (e.g. keeping separate stock levels for the numbers of green, red and blue t shirts instead of just the total number of t shirts)
  
• And more! For a full list visit our ozCart Add-ons pages.