E-Commerce: Choosing the Right Shopping Cart Application
You’ve decided to move you company ahead and establish an eCommerce website. One of the most important decisions involving eCommerce websites and one that has a long-term impact on your success is selecting a shopping cart platform. Choosing the best platform for your business is crucial, switching from one to another can be costly and very time-consuming.
With an abundance of shopping cart software out there, the right decision may be a bit frustrating to make. There are key essential features to compare and look for when making your shopping cart platform decisions.
If you don’t know what features you’re going to need for your site just yet, just think about the products or services you’re selling and think about the properties of them. Do they have variants (colors, sizes, etc.), or kits, are they drop shipped? These types of questions will help identify what kind of features your business will need. Here are a few other high priority items related to eCommerce sites.
Key Shopping Cart Platform Features:
- Integration: This means orders placed on the website come directly through to ERP, with customer information available for CRM functionality, and of course real-time inventory and product information coming directly from the warehouse, and accounting and sales information all running out of the same system.
- Extensibility: What we mean by extensible is that the solution allows for the integration of add-ons and third party tools. This allows for the platform to be more scalable and flexible to meet your needs.
- One-Page Checkout: Even today many of the shopping cart platforms still don’t have this feature. Just by having a simplified one-page checkout without requiring users to register, shopping cart abandonment rates are dramatically reduced.
- Design Flexibility: Usability and accessibility should be important factors when it comes to the design of any website, including eCommerce sites. What exactly does this mean? CSS based website designs allow your site to be more compliant with both of these standards. Many shopping cart platforms today use hard-coded table based designs that are often difficult to modify or are even impossible to design around a complete CSS framework.
- Custom URL Rewriting: Most shopping cart platforms today included this feature, URL rewriting. In fact, having a platform that allows URL rewrting is a must. URL rewriting allows you to have “pretty” URLs, that your potential customers or users can understand. And they are “SEO friendly”, which can generate more traffic.
- Custom Meta Info: Having the ability to have customized titles, and description tags for each page on your site is another must. Having the same title on every page is not advisable from a SEO standpoint.
Our E-Commerce Consulting services can assist the success of your business by building powerful customized e-commerce applications that will enhance your customers’ online shopping experience and assure your business goals. If your ready to help increase sales, improve profitability, and ultimately, ROI through Ximda’s E-Commerce Consulting Services, Contact us today for a free web consultation.