Marketing should be fun. Online marketing should be even more fun, and it is! That is, until you get to the part where you are actually trying to sell some stuff. Besides the usual marketing challenges, the online world presents you with a new and different challenges – how to list your products, how to collect money, how to deliver? Welcome to the confusing world of ecommerce software!
When choosing your shopping cart software, you need to be aware of a few important points:
- The Administration must be easy to use, you do not want to waste time there when you should be busy marketing your products
- The software must be secure and perform fast
- The software must be Search Engine friendly
- The entire sales to order process should be as automated as possible
- Payment options must include several different ones (usually PayPal and Credit Cards are a must)
- Tracking and reporting features should be rich
There are a host of features that any shopping cart should have, however, only you can determine which are the most important ones for your online store. There are a lot of technical decisions that are tied to this also. For example, your hosting package for your web site could restrict your choice of shopping cart solutions. You will need to decide on whether to use PHP, ASP, CGI, or any of the many different choices out there. If you are not very technical, do not like to “tinker”, I have an alternative suggestion for you: consider a hosted shopping cart. Ecommerce software are complex to set up and run, but a hosted solution means that all the technical stuff has been taken care of and you only need to focus on your shop itself.
One possible solution which is new to me was ASHOP Commerce. I took a look there and found that they actually have quite a comprehensive list of features. Of course, there is no such thing as a perfect ecommerce software. However, I found the feature set of ASHOP adequate for most common needs. But what is good is the tiered pricing program. They have 4 different levels of pricing from a single shop Starter package to a B2B (Business-to-Business) Enterprise level of features and capabilities.
I suggest that you first have your marketing plan in place. Then, when you are ready, go for a hosted shopping cart software and get up and running in a few hours. That way, you will not lose your momentum and your online marketing efforts will not lose any of its sharp edge!
While I am not a shopping cart software expert, I have done my share of hunting down appropriate shopping carts for various projects. I can tell you, many times, after weeks of sweat and tears, I sometimes wish I had taken a hosted solution instead.
[tags]shopping cart software, shopping cart, ecommerce software[/tags]
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