Step 7 - The Shopping Cart.

The final step I take in designing a site is to put in a shopping cart. If you are offering products on your site, it is crucial to offer your customers a secure way to order online. 90% or more of my orders come directly online, so it vital that your site's shopping function offer an easy to use, secure way of ordering your products.

Shopping Cart Options There are a couple of basic options for shopping carts. The first are all inclusive programs that design both your site and also take care of your shopping cart functions. These programs can be stand alone programs that you buy and implement, or online programs like Yahoo Store that you pay for on a monthly basis.

I don't like these kind of programs in general because I don't want a shopping cart program to design the pages of my site. Instead, I want to design the look and feel of each page, and then put in an ordering table or order buttons on the page to allow ordering. Also, many of these all encompassing programs, like Yahoo Stores, charge you a percentage of sales as well - and I just won't give up this kind of profit.

But if you are putting up a large catalog of products, this may be something you want to consider. I don't have a particular one to recommend, so look for people's reviews and also ones that don't charge a fee based on the volume of sales you do and instead just charge a simple, and small, monthly fee.

The other options are very simple shopping cart programs that allow you to add ordering buttons to pages you have already designed. These most commonly work by putting in a piece of html code into your product page that has the product's ordering information (name, price, description, etc.).

The big downside to these programs is that they just aren't very secure - anyone with a knowledge of html can go change the pages coding and try to order the product for whatever price they want by changing the price in the pages code. So if you are going to use one of these programs, you need to keep an eye on your orders to make sure no one sneaks an order by with an artificially low price. That is why I avoid these type of programs, and instead only use a cart program whose button coding only links to the cart with a product id -- and then the pricing of the product is set in the cart, not on the html coding of the button on the page.

Reason Carts So Important

I must have looked at literally hundreds of shopping carts over the last couple of years, to try to find a cart that has the most usability and functionality. The reason I've spent so much time is that a good shopping cart can increase orders by 30 - 50% or more by reducing shopping cart abandonment. Shopping cart abandonment is when a customer abandons the order during the shopping cart checkout process, and this is a huge problem for internet businesses. Two out of three customers abandon shopping carts during checkout - and this is so frustrating since you have a willing customer, who wants to buy, but they get derailed often due to a bad shopping cart process.

The kind of things that can derail a user are: requiring user registration, asking for too much information, not showing all the costs for a product till late in the checkout, cart loading slowly, having confusing error messages, and not having sufficient security.

I've spent a great deal of time fine tuning the shopping cart I use to do a much better job on these basic issues. And while I still wish I could improve the cart in some areas, I have seen my checkout statistics improve dramatically. Just by addressing some of these basic issues, I have improved shopping cart conversions (the percentage of people checking out who begin the process) by 50%. This is a huge gain in sales without any additional cost. So picking a good shopping cart is one of the most important choices you will be making in setting up your website.

Picking a Cart

So how do you pick a shopping cart? There are certainly a lot to choose from, and sorting through the different options can make your head swim. While I do from time to time review shopping cart options with an eye to improving the cart I use, so far I keep coming back to two basic options. First, for those of you just starting out, I would recommend taking a look at Mal's Ecommerce. The basic cart they offer is free, and the upgraded version (which offers a few nice administrative functions) is only $6 a month.

The interface is pretty easy to use, and you can do a fair amount of customizing to make the cart fit your site's look. The main drawbacks are that the cart does use html to show the products' price, and you can't customize the way the cart works past a certain point. But the upside is that the cart is pretty functional, and since the cart is a stand alone add on, you can host your basic site on any web host and then add on the Mal's shopping cart.

I have had a friend use this cart for his site's and he thought it worked well, and the price was certainly right. Mal's Ecommerce is really recommend for someone just starting out, and if a site works well you can certainly upgrade later to a more expensive option if you decide you need more functionality.

What do I use? I use a program called 1ShoppingCart -- but I don't use their general product catalog version which charges a percentage on each sale, but instead the version that just allows you to put order buttons on your product pages. This version is just a small monthly fee (I do the basic version at $39), with no percentage fee based on sales. And if you want, for a bit more you can get auto responder features, affiliate tracking, and up sell modules.

For the most part, I like 1Shoppingcart. It does allow me to customize the cart pages so they look just like my site, which helps conversion. It also allows me to do have the customer go right to the checkout page on clicking to order the product -- and the checkout is all on one page, which also reduces abandonment. And there is no login required.

There are aspects I don't like as well, but I've found that carts are always a tradeoff, and for now this cart offers most of the functionality I'm looking for.

I did end up putting this cart into the My Favorite Baby Carrier Page, but walking you through it is perhaps too technical proposition. In general, I did customize the checkout so it looked just like her usual pages. But for detailed information on using 1shoppingcart, I think you are better served by the 1ShoppingCart Queen. She has fairly inexpensive materials available that guide you through using 1shoppingcart -- both on getting the product buttons on your cart as well as customizing the order checkout pages.

Next > Making the Site Work

Previous < Step 6 - The Content Areas of the Site

comments powered by Disqus