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Internet Shopping Carts
Category: Home and Family, InternetWhen it comes to shopping carts the world is your oyster. There are numerous carts to choose from. However, setting up a professional shopping cart is time consuming, often problematic, and depending on your choice of merchant account - open to possible fraudulent transactions.
Firstly you need to decide exactly what type of shopping cart you want. This might sound like an easy task but much will depend on style, functionality and acceptable online payment methods. Another consideration might be a requirement for downloadable products which are treated differently to standard items that are dispatched by traditional methods.
We would all like a professional customized shopping cart with automated facilities, clear and concise record keeping and transaction processes which are simple and effective and this is where it all becomes confusing. Some shopping carts offer excellent templates that can be adapted with ease and others are more limited in their look and feel and the degree with which they can be adapted to suit the customer. How will your chosen shopping cart cope with multiple orders and does it have the function to calculate postal costs based on standard postal rates?
We downloaded and tested 9 shopping carts before we decided to run with the one we have currently. Each differed greatly and all were unique in their own way. Some of the open source free shopping carts actually have better facilities than the fee based ones. Even before you get started you need to select a shopping cart that is based on your level of expertise. Dive in at the deep end and you are asking for trouble. Setting up and customizing a shopping cart will take time. At the very basic level you will need to understand HTML and how to set the shopping cart up on your hosting account. Many shopping carts rely on PHP and use a MySQL database. If you are unfamiliar with these terms consider a shopping cart that is already hosted.
Once your chosen shopping cart is up and running the fun really starts. No it doesn’t - it is a tedious and long winded exercise to load a couple of hundred products onto a shopping cart along with the necessary text and photos. All the more time consuming if you are the one taking the photographs.
Finally when your shopping cart is up and running and you have tested it thoroughly you unleash it on the internet and sit back and wait for the orders to come flooding in. And you wait. And wait. In actual fact after all that effort you are not even close to the half way mark in setting up your online business. The marketing and publicizing of your shopping cart is just as time consuming as everything you have done so far. Without a good marketing strategy you will fail.
Some online shopping carts rely on ebay customers to get started. Others promote themselves through existing websites with a steady stream of visitors. If you are starting cold turkey then you had better have a plan. The debris of abandoned shopping carts all over the internet is proof that a successful shopping cart is not actually that easy to achieve. It will take time and effort and there are few short cuts unless you are prepared to pay for them - Google pay per click is one such example commonly used to drive traffic to new websites.
Finally, be wary of those transactions of high value from customers using overseas hotmail or yahoo accounts. Always establish where possible the identity of your customers. At the very least take their contact numbers and insist on calling them for credit card verification purposes where necessary. Better to delay shipment and carry out a few basic checks than suffer from a clawback in payments when the credit card used is found to be stolen or cloned.
We use Zen Cart which we have found to be most suitable for the type of products we sell. We only sell in the UK and Zen Cart has a UK Royal Mail plug in which makes postal calculations and multiple orders very flexible and efficient.
If you need advice or assistance in setting up a UK shopping cart then don’t hesitate to drop us a line. We will charge you a fee but you might save a great deal of time and frustration in the long run.
www.e-shoppinguk.com is a UK based shopping cart operating from Birmingham in the West Midlands.
Tags: buk24hours, cart, e-shop, goods, online, paypal, services, shop, shopping, uk, zen