Saturday, March 24, 2007

Shopping Cart for Small Business

As a small business owner, I have been through about 3 shopping carts. As my business grows and my budget, I have upgraded to ensure a smooth online shopping experience.

As a business owner, I want to come across as being professional and trustworthy. I also want customers who add items to their cart to be able to navigate to the final sale. If it is too complicated, you will have a lot of unpaid orders or SCA (shopping cart abandonment).

Offering the customers choices of payment is essential. Paypal is great because it is recognized. Google checkout is fairly new but of course Google is well branded. The thing I like about these options is that they handle the credit card details and I don't have to worry about securing data for the next 3 years!

Another of my biggest challenges is loading all my pictures, description, prices, etc into the shopping cart, so customers can make a purchase. This is very time consuming for a solo business owner but an evil necessity! :)

I'm currently using Mal's Shopping cart but would like something a bit more seamless (too many clicks and pages to go through). Here's a shout out to any other small business owners who have faced this challenge and come up with an economical solution....I'ld love to hear from you!