Action Steps
The best contacts and resources to help you get it done

Watch a tutorial about ecommerce shopping cart software

A shopping cart is the first step to your online business. A shopping cart does not stand alone, however. You need to know how to market and how to follow up with customers.

I recommend: ShoppingCartTraining has tutorials about shopping carts and other tools and services that work well along side a shopping cart—like auto responders and database managers. 1shoppingcart.com tries to answer questions in a new shopping cart users mind like do you need an opt-in box, what about sales and shipping taxes, order notifications, e-mail marketing tools, auto responders and eBook delivery systems.

Hire a shopping cart service company who does it all for you

An online business can take a lot of time if you do it yourself. Alternatively, you can find a company that will do most of it for you. It depends on how much time and money you have to spend.

I recommend: SureMerchant offers email marketing, auto responders, a website and all that an online business entails is involved. ShopVisible and 3dcart.com offer complete solutions for your ecommerce store.

Stick to basics and put together a shopping cart solution from scratch--almost

Unless you are a computer programmer, you will not be able to build a shopping cart all by yourself. However, you can buy the parts and pieces and get pretty close to doing it on your own. You can find basic HTML shopping cart software that you can load onto your website. You can also subscribe to an auto responder on your own.

I recommend: For the more adventurous type, HTML-Cart will help you build your shopping cart from the ground up with an HTML shopping cart software solution that allows you to do it yourself. You can purchase and learn about an auto responder at Interspire. Buy software to transfer digital downloads of eBooks and digital products to customer's sites from DigiVendor.

Helpful advice for making the most of this Guide

• •  A shopping cart system is only a first step toward online selling. If you allow customers to buy from you without a way to follow up with customers, you will lose potential business. In addition, you will have lost the opportunity to offer those customers other products in the future. Be sure you give the marketing side of your business adequate attention. It really is everything.

Guide to Choosing a Web Site Shopping Cart

Without the right set of features, your ecommerce site may not reach its potential

By Chris Maxcer, Freelance Writer

1. Make sure the cost of the cart matches your online sales volume and profit. Sites with high sales volumes need a feature-packed cart.
2. If you have an existing Web site, your shopping cart must work with your site and integrate with your Internet provider's Web servers.
3. Select a shopping cart that offers secure online credit-card processing.

Action Steps
The best contacts and resources to help you get it done

Use your Internet provider's shopping-cart solution

Many Internet service providers offer Web store hosting services that include shopping carts. The primary benefit of going through your ISP is compatibility with your Web servers and the ease of working with one service provider.

I recommend: Examine your ISP's offerings and consider switching if you need to. Here are a few ISPs that offer integrated shopping carts: Yahoo! Merchant Solutions, Network Solutions, PowWeb and VistaPages. Also see Web Hosting Blog Review for more.

Integrate specialty shopping-cart software with your site

If you have a high volume of online transactions or a large inventory of items for sales, you can buy ecommerce software with more feature-rich shopping cart applications that help with everything from inventory control to marketing.

I recommend: Check out CNET's shopping cart reviews, TopTenREVIEWS' Shopping Cart Software Review or Shopping Cart Reviews.

Get a free shopping-cart solution

There are some solid free shopping cart solutions available, but they tend to require more upfront integration work and technical knowledge to implement.

I recommend: Check out ZenCart and osCommerce.

Leverage eBay and PayPal

You can use these two popular ecommerce services as low-rent shopping car services.

I recommend: eBay Stores lets you build a Web site storefront as well as simply sell items online without a storefront. PayPal Merchant Tools lets you utilize PayPal to accept payments over the Web, with or without credit cards, but doesn't replace shopping carts for higher-volume transactions.

Get more shopping-cart savvy

Cart applications are one part of increasingly sophisticated ecommerce systems that can handle tax payments, shipping deals, cross-selling and upselling, inventory and more. It pays to keep up with carts.

I recommend: Read e-commerce how-to guides from WebMonkey and Entrepreneur.

Helpful advice for making the most of this Guide

• •  If you need extra help, your ISP or shopping cart vendor can often recommend IT consultants who are familiar with their shopping cart technology and can get you up and running at a reasonable cost.

Action Steps
The best contacts and resources to help you get it done

Partner with a shopping cart solution that offers conversion and automation tools

Several shopping car solutions businesses can do a lot for you as a business owner and your conversion rates. Also, sometimes ecommerce shopping cart software is so good that you want to tell other people about it. You can make commissions selling the product as an affiliate marketer.

I recommend: WebMarketingMagic.com offers auto responders, bulk uploads of digital products, inventory tracking, support for multiple websites, pop-up capture, ezine and e-newsletter management and double opt-in messages. 1automationwiz.com has starter packs to fully automated programs. Interspire.com offers shopping cart software that is easy to put on your website. Their shopping cart solutions come with marketing support as well.

Use analytics as a shopping cart solution to make the most of an online business

Testing and measurement can lead to better conversion and customer-list building. The Internet has improved marketing methods with its ease of testing. With shopping cart services analytics you can find out what is working and not working in your online campaign.

I recommend: GDMI offers free shopping cart trials. They also assist in organic marketing, keywords and SEO, by tracking who is buying what and when. They can help you figure out which one of your marketing campaigns is working and why. Futurenow specializes in working with shopping cart solutions using analytics. They help optimize shopping carts for maximum ROI.

Work with shopping cart systems that offer buy-me-buttons, surveys and pop-ups for your customers

Shopping cart services help Internet marketers and businesses with all kinds of ways to increase conversion rates-encourage sales and sign-ins. Some companies offer attractive buy-now buttons, surveys and questionnaire templates, opt-in boxes and pop-ups to capture sales and email addresses.

I recommend: 1ShoppingCart is a shopping cart service that offers custom forms, opt-in boxes, a pop-up wizard, questionnaires, surveys, up-sell modules among other capture and automation tools. GoEmerchant.com features buy-me buttons with their shopping cart solutions. The shopping software user simply inputs sells information, price, product and shipping details in order to post the live buy-me buttons onto a website.

Helpful advice for making the most of this Guide

• •  As an Internet marketer, you can sign up as an affiliate of a shopping cart solution companies you like and use to promote that company to other Internet marketers. When those individuals or companies sign up to use the shopping cart, you will get a commission from the shopping cart company.

Action Steps
The best contacts and resources to help you get it done

Payment gateways and merchant accounts

As pointed out by ecommerce experts, shopping cart solutions are not usually fully integrated models for transaction processing. Instead, a shopping cart solution tends to be a user interface, with the actual transactions being routed to what many call a 'payment gateway.'

I recommend: Find out more about the interaction between standard shopping carts and payment gateway, or merchant account, options at Taming the Beast: "Web marketing and ecommerce tools, tips, and resources."

Shopping cart functionality

Shopping cart functionality means a cart with built-in software features can do different things for customers. 'Add to cart' functionality, for example, means customers can easily add items to their own shopping carts online. 'Save for later' functionality means customers can come back to the online site and follow through with their prior actions.

I recommend: Find out more about shopping cart functionality at Practical ECommerce.

ISP

When it comes to setting up a business shopping cart system online, an ISP, or Internet Service Provider, can be a handy helper. A business with a need for more Ecommerce installations can talk to the ISP about developing a customized solution.

I recommend: Get tips on using ISPs for Ecommerce setups at WebSiteTips.com.

Cookies

Cookies-small electronic files that reside on the computer-are popular for getting and keeping customer data on Internet shopping cart sites. A cookie is any bit of data that is stored on a computer to provide information on a visitor.

I recommend: A set of tutorials by Joe Burns on HTMLGoodies will help readers figure out the connection between shopping carts and cookies. Read the shopping cart page first, then click through for a cookie tutorial.

Conversion

This handy term is useful for talking about how many regular visitors actually buy something from a site. Tracking conversion is often a necessary way to do return-on-investment research.

I recommend: Find out more about conversion and how to attain it at Practical ECommerce.

URL

The URL, also known as a web address, is the location of your shopping cart. Getting a customized URL is often one of the first steps in putting together a shopping cart Ecommerce site. Managers can buy or rent specialized web addresses otherwise known as 'domain names' from big holders, such as Yahoo.

I recommend: Find out more about the URL and other shopping cart startup details at GoEMerchant.