How to Pick an Ecommerce Shopping Cart

Finding the right shopping cart is not an easy task. It often takes lots of time in research and you really have to analyze where you want to go with your store. You do not want to be too restricting by going with an overly simple one where you may not be able to add products and things. At the same time, you may not have a demand for one that has all the bells and whistles. This is why there are so many out there. Many have different options that you may or may not need. It is now time to go through and figure out which one will work best for you. Below is the method that I recommend you use to finding the right one.

Develop a List

Start out by doing some searching. You can ask other people what they use, look at other ecommerce websites, and you might even do a search to find some fairly popular ones. It is okay if you start out with a fairly lengthy list. While putting it together, you might as well go ahead and eliminate those that you know you definitely will not want. However, if you are not developing the list and just found it online, you may need to use the two following methods to help eliminate several of them.

Remove Shopping Carts That Are Bloated

First off, you should already have a good idea of what you want your website to look like. Likewise, you should also have a fairly good understanding of the procedure you want your website visitors to go through to purchase a product. Keep in mind: the more simple it is the more sales you will get. Do not ask questions that you do not care about.

Therefore, go through your list and look for shopping carts that may have this quality about them. You want to avoid shopping carts that require your website visitors to input too much information. Or, if the backend is too complicated and simply difficult to use because it has too many features, you should remove those as well.

Remove Shopping Carts That Do Not Meet Your Criteria

There are a huge variety of shopping carts out there. Some though will only allow for certain merchant accounts or have other restrictions. Quickly eliminate those from the list that may cause you problems down the road. You should look for those that are as closely as what you have in mind and nothing less. You certainly do not want to make too many sacrifices on your website where it does not have the process that you wanted to have. Get as close to what you had in mind as possible and other things can be added or removed later on down the road.

Check the Customer Service

Check for good customer service. While the best idea would be to just set it up and never have to deal with them, this is likely not going to be the case. You will probably need their help in someway to get it setup exactly right. You can simply check their service by sending the shopping carts customer service an email and ask them a few questions.

There are a couple of things you should look at. First, you want them have a timely response. If they are extremely slow (more than three days in my opinion) then I would avoid them. They likely will not help you with more difficult things if they can not even answer the simple questions you are asking.

Last, but not least, make sure their responses are not “canned” and remain professional. Good quality customer service means that their answers will be tailored to your questions. They are not simply automated or lack professionalism.

Remove the shopping carts from your list if they do not have good customer service.

The Final Stage

By now, your list should be fairly small. Now, simply read others reviews and pick one that you like the most. If you feel that one shopping cart was especially good in customer service, reviews, or very close to what you like, then simply pick that one. You will find that the closer you get to what you had in mind originally, the more pleased you will be with it later on.