Test Drive That Shopping Cart!

By Paula Mariedaughter and Jeanne Neath

A well-designed shopping cart makes shopping online easy and enjoyable for your customers, and gives you, the business owner, the vehicle to display and sell your products. The shopping cart is a series of complex programmed Web pages that you can buy or rent and add to your web site. The shopping cart keeps track of items ordered and adds up the total purchase, including shipping and sales tax. You will want a shopping cart that uses a database to make it quick and easy to display your products. The unpleasant alternative would be creating many, many web pages to display your products.

Take any potential shopping cart for a test drive! The variety of shopping carts on the market far exceeds the variety of car dealers trying to convince you to buy their car. The more you know about the shopping cart before you purchase it, the more likely you will have access to all the features that you desire. Service after the sale is as important in selecting a shopping cart as it is in buying a car!

Lease or Buy?
Many web hosts offer e-commerce hosting plans that provide a shopping cart. You can “lease your vehicle,” that is, you can rent space on the host’s shopping cart. This can be a quick way to put your products online. With some plans you will have instant access to important features like a secure socket layer and online credit card processing.

One disadvantage to this option is financial. Many of these e-commerce plans vary their rates based on the number of products displayed on their shopping cart. Others charge a fee for each transaction. As a “renter” you may spend more money long term than if you purchased a shopping cart outright.

A second disadvantage involves your options should you choose to leave the Web host providing your e-commerce plan. Will you lose all the product information stored in their database when you change hosts? If you have spent many hours adding products to your shopping cart, this would be a serious loss.

Purchasing your shopping cart will avoid the problems of long-term losses in time and money sometimes associated with leasing. However, your initial investment in purchasing a cart will be larger, so that shopping cart test drive becomes even more important!

Gather Information
We encourage you to shop around. Try out each shopping cart, preferably on a quilting or sewing site similar to yours. How does the cart handle fabric sales? Can you purchase a quarter or half yard of fabric? One cart we encountered insisted that you buy fabric in 1/10 sections. Are you able to locate fabrics (or thread, or batting) easily by designer, manufacturer, color, and other criteria important to your shoppers?

More general questions are important too. Is the product display suitable for your needs? How many products can the cart handle? What security measures does the cart use to protect credit card information?

You will especially want to know if the provider is a reputable business and if they support their cart. How familiar is your seller with the nuts and bolts of the shopping cart? Is phone support available? Can you understand the support person when you ask a question?

Choose a provider who knows their product inside and out, and one who stands behind their shopping cart with service after the sale. Your vehicle will give you years of reliable service.