Back-end management

Each shopping cart program has a set of administration tools. Although the specifics vary among types of software, ultimately these tools give you control of your shopping cart. Here’s a list of features to look for in admin tools:

• Administrative functions: Passwords, pricing changes, and options such as font size or number of items to display on a page are examples of the most basic settings that an administrator controls. Other admin functions should allow for easy management of order processing, inventory, shipping, returns, and more.

  If you’re not the type to be tethered to a desk, or you travel a good deal and don’t have staff to stay behind and manage your business, look for shopping carts that can be managed from mobile devices. You may need an app for your iPhone, iPad, or Android device that gives you mobile-ready access to the administrative features in your shopping cart.

• Customization: Choices, choices — this factor is important when you’re using a shopping cart program. The more you can change colors and fonts, for example, the more likely you are to create a shopping cart that melds with the rest of your site. Some shopping carts offer ready-to-use templates for simplicity, but you still want the capability to make small changes.
• Exporting: Always confirm that you can export your products from the shopping cart. This feature is critical if you end up using a different shopping cart down the road and need to transfer your inventory.
• Importing: Having to enter your products into a shopping cart one by one is the last thing you want to do. If you have dozens of product numbers (similar to bar codes), you would be typing at your keyboard for several days. Look for programs that allow you to import your products from an Excel spreadsheet (or a similar method).
• Inventory: If your shopping cart feature is integrated with your inventory system (if you already have one), you can easily manage your offline stock from your website.
• Taxes: A critical component of an e-commerce business is proper tax calculation on orders. The shopping cart needs to be easily configured to calculate local and state taxes.
• Currencies: Can the shopping cart handle more than one or two currencies? If you’re selling internationally, you want to make to be able to accept money in multiple currencies.
• Shipping: You’ll probably use more than one type of carrier, such as UPS and FedEx, for your shipping needs. The shopping cart should not only integrate with multiple shipping carriers but also give you flexibility in determining and calculating shipping rates. For example, you may want to offer flat-rate shipping for some items but tiered or location-based shipping rates for others. Some shopping carts can also get automated shipping rates calculated directly from the shipping carriers.
• Recurring billing: Do you sell web-based services in the B2B (business-to-business) market that are charged monthly? Or perhaps you offer membership-based product sales, such as a cheese of the month club, in the B2C (business-to-consumer) market? If you offer a subscription-based service, you may need a shopping cart that can handle recurring billing, or the capability to process payments more than once over a period of time. Look for shopping carts with a recurring feature that allows you to set time intervals (such as every month) and terms for billing your customers.
• Payment gateways: Hundreds of payment gateways exist, so make sure that your shopping cart integrates with and supports the gateway you selected to process credit cards. This capability can be especially important if you’re selling internationally. If a list of supported payment gateways is not readily available for the shopping cart you’re considering, talk with a salesperson and get written confirmation of the gateways supported.
• Wizards: Use these tools to customize your shopping cart and integrate it with your website. The wizard walks you step by step through the entire process. You may also see a wizard referred to as an easy or simple GUI (graphical user interface).

Customer-centric elements

Which features are most important to your customers? When you’re test-driving a shopping cart demo, try to view the experience from the eyes of your shoppers. Does the cart help your customers process their orders quickly? Or does it leave them frustrated and stick your site with a bad case of shopping cart abandonment? Here are some additional elements or features you can include that can benefit your customers (sometimes these features are considered add-on features or widgets and you must pay more to have them included in your shopping cart):

• Product views: Customers can’t touch or feel your products when they’re shopping online. The only qualities on which customers can base their purchasing decisions are the images and descriptions you give them. Be sure to use a shopping cart that allows you to upload multiple images for one product.

  The use of 3D and virtual reality tools (such as Facebook-owned Oculus Rift — the virtual reality headset) is beginning to become an important option for e-commerce retailers to show products. Online retail sites such as Wayfair (www.wayfair.com) are starting to experiment with virtual reality technology that gives users more realistic views of products and product placement in their homes. The technology may start out clunky, but we think 3D product views will become more sought after by consumers, so keep your eyes open for these customer-centric viewing options in the near future.

• Save settings: Can your customers save products in their shopping carts and then return later to make purchases? The capability to save these settings and others makes the shopping experience more pleasant.
• Store data: Does the cart give your customers the option to store their data? This feature prevents returning customers from having to reenter account information repeatedly. Having the option to save the data (especially credit card information) is equally important, however. Some customers would rather not sacrifice possible security risks in favor of convenience.
• Wish list: Some customers like to be able to designate products of interest that they’re not ready to buy. Try to find a shopping cart that lets customers save favorite products to wish lists that can be shared with friends and family.
• View order: Your customers should be able to view complete orders as they shop or when they check out. Having to view a series of pages before they can see their total shipping costs, for example, is particularly frustrating.

Integration and maintenance

For your shopping cart to work optimally, it has to become a seamless part of your overall site. If it doesn’t work, you need to be able to get help. Along these lines, you have to consider several critical integration and maintenance factors:

• Access to support: When and how is support available if you have trouble with your shopping cart? The best-case scenario is to have access to live support seven days a week. If you have to wait to get help, your customers also have to wait, and they aren’t fond of waiting. Don’t forget to ask whether you pay an extra fee for all that technical support.
• Accommodation of other customer accounts: Your shopping cart should have the flexibility to handle all types of orders — from wholesale orders to affiliates. Even if you don’t need the flexibility today, you want to know that it’s already built into your cart for use as you grow.
• Communication with shipping and handling: In addition to integrating your shopping cart with major shipping providers (such as UPS), you have to look closely at how orders are relayed for shipping and handling. Can you customize how and where the order requests are sent? For example, each time an order request is forwarded to your shipping department, can you have a duplicate copy e-mailed to another department?

• Integration with third-party applications: Your shopping cart needs to fully integrate with the other components of your business, including accounting- and inventory-management systems and your CRM (customer relationship management) software. One of the stickiest points of integrating any type of third-party business system with your shopping cart software is how well your shopping cart can relay information to the other system. If these two programs can’t function together (or integrate with each other), your workload doubles.

  Some shopping carts may offer an API (application programming interface) or a set of APIs that allow you access to the shopping cart for further customization or integration. Keep in mind that using APIs may require hiring or contracting with a software developer (or someone with development or coding skills).

Promotion and marketing

Of all the benefits a shopping cart can offer, the area of promotion and marketing usually receives the least amount of scrutiny before the purchase. Your first inclination is probably to look at how many products a shopping cart holds. Then you find out how much it will cost you. Marketing is one of the last items you consider, perhaps because you don’t realize a shopping cart can offer that feature.

Think again! The following list of marketing and promotion functions is a small sample of how your shopping cart can help you increase sales. See how many features are built into your shopping cart of choice:

• Bundled products or services: Based on a customer’s buying preferences, put together groups of products offered at a slight discount from what your customer would spend to purchase each item separately.
• Shopping cart abandonment deterrence: Customers often add products to a shopping cart only to leave the site before finalizing their purchase. Many reasons exist for this behavior — everything from a complicated checkout process that frustrates the customer to the customer simply changing her mind and leaving the site. Look for shopping cart abandonment features that not only capture the data of the lost sale but also let you easily send automated or customized e-mail to try and reengage the customer.
• Coupons: Set up coupon codes to be entered by customers at the time of purchase.
• Cross selling: Suggest similar or complementary products that customers might like when they view certain products or check out.
• Data feeds: Your shopping cart should communicate your product information with other comparison shopping sites, including Google Product Search, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, Shop.com, and Yahoo! Shopping.
• Discounts: Set up different types of customer groups (such as wholesale or frequent buyer) to give a discount based on buying behavior. Or offer limited-time discounts by product.
• E-mail communications: Send newsletters or specials to your customers by e-mail. You would do this in addition to e-mails used as a result of shopping cart abandonment.
• Featured products or specials: Highlight certain products or limited-time offers throughout your website.
• Free-shipping option: Offer free shipping as a marketing special. This feature can be an important competitive advantage during busy shopping seasons.
• Gift certificates: A helpful seasonal (or year-round) tool is to offer the option of purchasing and using gift certificates, or virtual gift cards.
• On-site search capability: A good search tool helps customers easily find products based on several search criteria, such as brand name, category, or generic product name.
• Product reviews and ratings: Feature additional information on product pages to increase credibility and boost the potential for purchase.
• Search-engine friendliness: Use the shopping cart built-in features to better market your products in major search engines. A shopping cart might offer <TITLE> and <META> tags for every product page or <ALT> tags with keywords.
• Social commerce: Integrate with social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. This type of feature provides a way to promote specials, coupon offers, and other discounts; to share customers’ purchases with their friends; and to spread positive reviews of your products and customer service.
• Survey tools: Find out what customers are thinking by displaying a brief survey before checkout or whenever a customer abandons a shopping cart.
• Tell-a-friend functionality: Enable customers to pass along product pages to friends and family members.
• Upselling: Offer an incentive to purchase more products by upselling — for example, “Buy one, get one at half price” or “Buy two and get one free.”

You don’t have to use all these marketing tools. They might even feel overwhelming at first. Don’t worry: That’s perfectly natural. However, we recommend using a shopping cart that has a variety of promotional features. Then, as you become more comfortable, start testing the waters and increasing your sales.

1ShoppingCart

The 1ShoppingCart (www.1shoppingcart.com) shopping cart has been around for a long time and has a large fan base. The company has moved beyond operating as only a hosted shopping cart and now offers marketing automation (e-mail marketing and contact management) and lead generation services. In fact, its starter plan, called “Autoresponder,” does not even include the shopping cart software. However, we still like 1ShoppingCart because its shopping cart functionality remains a powerhouse in the e-commerce industry. You can choose from two plans, which both include the company’s other marketing automation and lead generation services as part of the package. The Basic plan is $69 per month for a single user; or choose the Professional plan for $129 per month for three users. In addition to the number of user licenses, the biggest differences between the monthly plans are the additional features included with the Professional version, such as affiliate management, digital products, and “one-click upsell.” As for basic shopping cart features, you get the same features in every plan.

1ShoppingCart has an extensive set of shopping cart features, with great flexibility and choice. For example, 1ShoppingCart supports up to six shipping methods, in addition to international shipping, and provides a variety of ways to calculate shipping (including the option for free customer shipping). It also has a robust recurring billing feature and an impressive set of upsell features customized to the buyer’s shopping history.

You can get one month of free service of the 1ShoppingCart shopping cart, but you must go ahead and sign up as a customer, which means providing credit card information. If you know this is the right shopping cart solution for you, it doesn’t hurt to have that extra month of free service as you’re learning the solution and setting up your online store. Or, you can cancel the account prior to the free trial ending.

FoxyCart

FoxyCart (www.foxycart.com) is a true hosted shopping cart, but several things make this solution unique. For starters, FoxyCart promotes itself as being only one thing: a secure e-commerce platform — not a jack of all trades or a turnkey solution — and it means it.

Unlike many typical shopping cart solutions, FoxyCart does not attempt to include other back-end functionality, such as accounting, CRM (customer relationship management), or affiliate marketing. Although we usually suggest that start-up online retailers choose a shopping cart with more functionality, FoxyCart is an exception. It is set up as a solution for developers to use on behalf of online retailers. Yes, this means you need to work with a developer if you do not have certain programming skills. Again, this seems contrary to our typical advice, but in certain circumstances, FoxyCart makes it worthwhile to pay someone.

If you need a fully customizable shopping cart and the ease of a hosted product once customization is complete, FoxyCart is the ideal fit. It is fully customizable and can integrate with just about any third-party software, from QuickBooks to Salesforce. The shopping cart features one-page checkout, guest checkout, coupons and discounts, international shipping, tax calculations, and unlimited shipping options, including multi-shipping (shipping to multiple addresses from a single order), free in-store pickup, and free ground shipping. You see an example of the customizable, simple checkout process in Figure 5-1. FoxyCart also supports integration with over 70 payment gateways and allows for alternative payment methods (including Bitcoin). The most important take-away when considering choosing FoxyCart for your shopping cart is remembering that it is a fully customizable, hosted solution.

How much does it cost? This is where it gets even more interesting. FoxyCart starts out free, for as long as you need it — with a catch. Think of it as an unlimited free trial that gives you plenty of time to set up, customize, and learn to use the software. You pay for the service only when you are ready to launch your store live. This is beneficial because it doesn’t mean you’re throwing away money for monthly service fees while your store is still in development. When it comes time to pay up, FoxyCart uses a combination of monthly and per-transaction fees. The standard plan is $15 per month, plus a transaction fee of .5 percent (up to a maximum of 15 cents) with the first 100 transactions free. A custom SLL certificate costs $100 annually. The advanced plan is $250 per month with the same .5 percent transaction fee (up to a maximum of 5 cents), with the first 1,000 transactions free. The advanced plan does not charge for a custom SSL certificate. If your needs are particularly extensive, FoxyCart offers an Enterprise plan for $2,000 per month.

SLL stands for Secure Sockets Layer, and an SSL certificate is a means of authenticating a website and encrypting sensitive information (like credit card numbers) that passes between the site and a user. You can learn more about SSL certificates in Book 3, Chapter 4.

You may be scratching your head and again asking, “How much does it cost?” Here’s an example to help explain its pricing model. On the standard plan, if your average order is $25 and you have 200 transactions a month, you would pay approximately $28 per month. If you sell less than 100 items in a month, you only pay $15. This pricing model is beneficial if you stay under the maximum allowed number of free monthly transactions, or if your number of transactions fluctuate based on seasonality, for example. In that case, you are not locked into paying a high monthly fee just because you have a peak selling season each year.

Shopify

Shopify (www.shopify.com) is not only a hosted shopping cart but also a complete e-commerce solution that has received rave reviews since launching in 2006. With Shopify, you get access to a long list of shopping cart features at a price ranging from $29 to $299 per month. In addition to the number of user accounts you get, the biggest difference between monthly plans comes down to some important shopping cart features. Abandoned cart recovery, gift cards, and real-time carrier shipping calculations (from UPS, FedEx, and USPS) are available only in the two more expensive monthly plans. In addition, some key administrative-tracking and -reporting capabilities are available only in the most expensive monthly plan.

If your e-commerce needs don’t fit the standard mold, Shopify has designed three other unique pricing plans. A super basic version is available if you want to sell only on Facebook. Dubbed Shopify Lite, it costs only $9 per month. A Retail plan is available for merchants selling in bricks-and-mortar locations, which includes hardware integration. (This plan is a $40 add-on cost to any of the standard plans, and requires that you have an iPad.) The final option is an Enterprise package that includes lots of bells and whistles, no transaction fees, and allows you to sell on social media sites such as Facebook and Pinterest. Pricing varies for this option so you’ll need to get on the phone and talk with a Shopify salesperson. (Although most e-commerce start-ups don’t need to even think about this level of service, we still like to mention the availability of enterprise plans for existing, large e-tailers who are considering different back-end options for their online stores.)

Also good to know, Shopify’s shopping cart integrates with over 70 payment gateways, including several popular European payment gateways. If you’re selling internationally, Shopify’s shopping cart is particularly useful because it supports website checkout in more than 50 different languages. It also handles multiple currencies and automatically calculates major county and state tax rates.

A mobile version of the shopping cart is included free with all monthly Shopify plans, which means your customers can buy products from any mobile device. Shopify also provides an app that enables you to manage orders from your mobile phone. Because Shopify is a complete e-commerce solution, it offers lots of free and low-cost templates for your online store, including some that are responsive (mobile-ready), helping to ensure that your complete site (including your shopping cart) is displayed properly on every mobile device. Customers are more likely to not only browse products from their phones but also drop items into the shopping cart and complete the purchase. In Figure 5-2, you see an example of a clean, simplified shopping cart that also works well on any mobile device. For a complete list of features included with the Shopify shopping cart, visit www.shopify.com/online/ecommerce-solutions.