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Sep 30
2008
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How do you find the best shopping cart for your business?
Shopping cart providers sometimes overwhelm potential cutomers with jargon about ecommerce, payment gateways, layered navigation, merchant accounts, localisation, 128 bit SSL, PCI DSS compliance, the list goes on. With so many terms to get your head around, it would be easy for a business owner to be deterred from starting a shop. It need not be so difficult. There are a number of ways that at Osc Works we would like to help you choose the best shopping cart for you and your business.
Some tips include:
- Decide how you want to accept payments first. Will you or won't you accept credit cards? To answer that question try to put yourself in the shoes of your customers. How would they like to pay? What are your competitor's sites doing? If you are going to accept credit cards, then you have two basic choices - keep customers on your site and pass the collected credit card information to a third-party payment gateway for processing, or redirect customers to a specialist payment website like Paypal or Paymate for processing.
Redirecting customers to another site has the disadvantage that you lose control - if they click away in the payment process you may not know about the order details. The disadvantage with some shopping cart providers is that you need to ensure your site has encryption of data that goes through the checkout process and meets Visa and MasterCard's strict PCI DSS compliance requirements. ozCart shopping cart software websites take the worry away from this aspect of your planning, because our servers are already PCI DSS compliant. You just need to make sure your business processes are compliant too and you will meet the standards required.
Osc Works ozCart shopping cart software supports a number of Australian, NZ and international payment gateways as well as Paymate or Paypal. You choose. - Think about your postage/shipping options. There are a huge number of options for selecting your postage or shipping options for an online store. If you are a wholesaler for example, you may wish to allow your customer's main office purchase from you online and then have their order shipped to each of their stores. Multiple shipping addresses is an option in only a few shopping carts so if that is an important feature for you, choose carefully. Other considerations include whether you want to include a live Australia Post calculator, have flat rates or offer different options for customers in different state. With ozCart these are all possible, but not every shopping cart is so flexible - especially ones derived or directly licensed from American distributors.
- Think about your customers. Having a nice easy to use managment system will save you time so this is absolutely essential. But equally important is the experience for your customers. How easy is it for customers to add a product to their cart and buy from you? Does your shopping cart offer a progress bar telling customers how much further they have to go? Try the ecommerce demo of the shopping cart you are planning to buy and ask yourself if your customers would find that process easy.
- Make sure you will get great support. Whatever you are thinking of doing, ask your potential shopping cart provider if you have any questions. How they answer questions will give you an idea of what type of support you will get. See if they have a knowledgebase, if they have a ticket system and whether they seem willing to answer your questions promptly or not. Do they confuse you or make it easy for you?
- Do they have an online ordering system as well as phone orders? If you are buying an online shopping cart from a provider that doesn't have an online ordering system themselves, isn't that a bit strange? Don't they have confidence in what they do?
