Shoppin Cart Improvements

Improve Your Shopping Cart

If you want visitors to your site to use your shopping cart you need to make improvements to the usability of the cart and to make the purchase process as simple and short as possible.

Did you know that the checkout process is where more sales are lost than any other time during the buying process? Check your analytics and see if you have a large number of individuals leaving your site before finishing the checkout process, if this is happening than you know that you definitely need to make improvements. In order to determine where you need to make shopping cart improvements you can ask someone who is not familiar with your website to go through the process and check out the usability of your shopping cart. Ask them to specifically comment on how accessible the shopping cart is, if it is easy to use, if they ran into problems were they able to find instructions on how to use the cart, and did they find the shipping and payments methods that they prefer to use?

Investigate how easy it is to navigate around finding products. Do you have a search feature and does it give accurate results?

If you belong to any business forums ask members to rate your site and their shopping experience.

Ask yourself how organized your site is, how secure do people feel making purchases and how user friendly is the shopping experience on your site?

Your shopping cart is one of the most important parts of your Website. Periodically evaluating the shopping cart from a user’s point of view can improve not only your shopping cart but improve your sales as well.

Look at your shopping cart objectively does it meet all of your needs as the administrator? Can you manage all of the product fulfillment, payment and shipping needs in a timely manner without mistakes? Evaluate the hosting, customer service and technical support of the company who’s shopping cart you are using. How happy are you with the features? When upgrades are available is there an additional fee or are upgrades free to existing customers?

Does your shopping cart blend in well with your Website? Do you receive the information you need about your customers and their sales? Does your shopping cart have the capability to have an affiliate program, produce a newsletter or evaluate the shopping experience of your customers?

Does your shopping cart grow with your business or have you outgrown the shopping cart?

Shopping Cart Sense

Does An Online Shopping Cart
Make Sense To You?

Anyone online who has items to sell needs to have some way for customers to make a purchase in a secure fashion. The answer that customers are beginning to expect from online merchants is to have a shopping cart. A shopping cart is a virtual cart that is actually a software program or script. It is a series of pages that are either in JavaScript or PERL allowing data to be transferred as the buyer is taking actions along the buying journey. The pages involved in this buying journey are all linked together within the shopping cart. There may be a page for each type of item, there may also be an order page link that will list all the purchases selected by the customer and gives the final price.

A shopping cart may be a mysterious thing for most online visitors but to those with technical knowledge the something mysterious is more than not is something that uses "cookies" that store the information that the buyer is inputting along the buying journey such as the particular item chosen to be purchased, the size, color and also the quantity.

You can think of a virtual shopping cart as an online ordering system that use HTML code for "order buttons" that when a customer clicks on the buttons a page pops up from the ordering system, usually hosted on a different Website where the actual financial transaction takes place OR you can think of it as a store-building system in which the shopping cart is actually the store front and the items purchased are placed in a virtual shopping cart that stays on the site and the financial transaction takes place right there on the same site. If you are selling 50 or more different products than you will be better off having a on-site shopping system that includes a online catalog, a managing system, a payment system and a shipping system. A modern shopping cart is more like storefront software because of all the features it does including storing and analyzing data concerning the customers buying transactions.

Not all shopping carts are the same. Some carts are pretty basic and others have all kinds of bells and whistles on them and are quite expensive.

Basic shopping carts will typically allow a customer to make a few choices such as size, color and quantity. The more sophisticated storefront type shopping carts may show how many items are in the cart and what the running dollar amount total is as items are being added to the cart. Shipping fees and tax calculations are done once the customer inputs a physical address to have the items shipped to. Shipping calculations are done using look-up tables that the merchant or administrator sets up or they are done by real-time calculations that major shippers and couriers input. A cart that is up-to-date on shipping requirements will offer shipping options such as USPS, UPS and FedEx. Shipping calculations usually include sales total, weight, number of items, the zone being shipped from and to or a fixed shipping price for all products. Some systems allow for a special surcharge to be selected if the item is especially large or bulky.

Does all of this make any better sense to you?

Online shopping carts

New To Online Shopping Carts?

If you are unaware that shopping carts exist online than you will learn a lot from this article. Website owners who sell more than just a few items on their site will usually have a shopping cart so that customers will have a more pleasant and efficient shopping experience while on their Website. Unlike a physical shopping cart that is made of metal or plastic a online shopping cart is a piece of software, or a script, that allows customers to put items they wish to purchase into a virtual (online) shopping cart so that they can save them to purchase when they are done browsing.

An online shopping cart will usually allow the customer to have a running dollar total of the merchandise they have placed in the online cart. Sometimes the running total will even include the shipping fee.

If a customer frequents the same Website multiple times some shopping carts will save the shipping information so that the customer does not have to keep entering it each time they shop on the site.

Online shopping carts can even keep track of inventory levels that can save the customer a lot of frustration and time. Some shopping carts are even smart enough to make suggestions based on the customers past preferences while shopping on the site.

Online shopping carts can make your shopping experience faster, easier and hassle-free. Shopping carts have also been known to send out an email thanking the customer for shopping and confirm the order - can physical metal or plastic shopping carts do that?

Online shopping carts allow customers to add to the cart, delete items, change the quantity of items already in the cart, and also input the size or color of an item.

The online shopping cart can help the Website owner to appear more professional, and can help to create a secure and friendly atmosphere in which to shop. The shopping cart should match the theme of the Website and look like it is a part of the site and not a separate entity. Website owners should choose a shopping cart software that is easy for customers to navigate and have the features that are helpful for both the owner and the customers.

Shopping cart solutions for Website owners can be simple or complex depending on the number of items and the number of transactions that the Website usually handles each month. Shopping cart solutions can be free or they can be very expensive depending on the services provided and the number of features provided with the shopping cart. Some shopping carts are complete storefront solutions and others are basic shopping carts.

A Website that is offering goods or services that does not have a shopping cart may turn customers away if they are already used to the convenience of using online shopping carts.