Tips on Selecting Shopping Cart Software

Finding the right shopping cart software for your ecommerce site may not be a high priority for you, but it should be. A bad experience for your potential customer means a lost sale for your business. Finding the best shopping cart for your site can be a tedious research task but it's important.

In the world of Ecommerce, your ASP.NET shopping cart can make you or break you.  Look for an ASP.NET shopping cart that is a complete turn-key solution with all product pages, features, and capabilities built in.

There is no way for you to possibly compare hundreds of different shopping carts for your site, so narrow down your search and decide how many, and which ones you are going to review. If you only have a few items for sale, or your items are digital products, a simple shopping cart program and payment processor like paypal.com or 2checkout.com might be all you need.

However if you offer hundreds of different products in several categories and you expect to grow, you need a shopping cart program that can handle it seamlessly for your customer. Incorporating discounts or coupons might be a factor you need to consider. If you have to ship products you'll need a program that can automatically calculates shipping. Also consider that many people use a different billing address for their credit cards than the ship to address.

Another tip on finding the best shopping cart for your site is to go and look at sites that already are in business! Look at some of the most popular sites and look at more local and/or small business sites as well. Go through the check out process as far as you can without actually purchasing the product.

When you are looking at a specific ecommerce software that you are thinking about buying, check out their site and demos. See how the graphics look and how well they would blend with your website. You'll want to see if the transition from page to page is smooth with no errors or 'page not founds' happening that would cause you to lose out on sales. Also, it is important that the software allows you to design your storefront to look exactly the way you want it to. This should be a definite feature of the shopping cart software you end up with.

Customer support for your business is vital. If something goes wrong with the software you'll want to be able to reach someone immediately and not just fill out a support ticket. Is there a 24/7 chat or phone line available. Is there an email address. Every hour your shopping cart software doesn't work is an hour that you've lost sales.

Another factor to consider is whether you're installing the software on your own server and supporting it yourself or whether you're using the software on the provider's server. If it's own your own server make sure you have the bandwidth to handle it.

What was the best shopping cart experience you ever had? Was there a site that you bought something from that was just super easy and a pleasure to deal with? Try to go back to that store and see if you can find out what shopping cart they are using for their site.