| Are you serious about Online Sales? : Shopping Cart
Availability of secure payment gateway has simplified buying products and subscribe to any services online. If your website has static information about you and your products, then you might be loosing some customers who decide buying quickly online.
If you have yet not decided about Shopping cart, here are some guidelines for making good and ideal shopping cart for your product / services.
1. The Purpose:
It is very important for you to know what are you going to sell online. Product or Services. For selling a product, you need some nice pictures of a product. Services should be sold as a subscription for one time or on monthly basis. Product can be bought twice, but services have renewal /cancellation. Shopping cart for both will be logically same but one should have capability to handle it.
2. Display:
Shopping cart should be made to display your product in such a way to get feel of it. You can decide it while designing the website. The display of your product impacts purchasing of the product.
To sell paintings online, shopping cart will include pictures of prints and frames and ability to view priview by changing wall color.
3. Payment Gateway
It is very important to know about all popular Payment Gateway before integrating it into the shopping cart.
- It should be secure. It should be certified by VeriSign Secured, Trust-e, Privacy BBBOnline and others.
- Fees of transaction/commission.
- Easier to withdraw money.
- It should accept all Credit Cards online.
4. Platform:
There are two kind of severs available, Windows and Linux. If you already have a website and are looking for shopping cart, then it will be easier for you to integrate shopping cart on the same platform. Linux/Unix server support PHP/cgi/perl and Windows support Microsoft Languages ASP/ASP.Net.
5. Open vs Custom Shopping Cart
There are some Open-Source Shopping cart. The popular one is OsCommerce. These are available free of cost. But it has its:
PRO:
- It is Free
- Easy to install it. As most of the Linux based hosting server comes with it.
- Great Admin Area to upload products and setting prices.
CONS:
- Setting Look and Feel of the shopping has limit to somewhat extent.
so you need a programmer to do changes.
- Extendibility: You can not easily extend any functionality
.
Custom Shopping cart are considered better for:
- Preference for particular design.
- Support with regular minor changes.
- Unique functionalities like example of selling paintings with great features of showing wall colors.
- Extendability for future changes. Own choice of functionality and flexible approach.
The Author, Rakesh K. Sidana, is a senior member of DOW. His articles on web technologies have been published in leading magazine in India. He contributes his aricles to DesignOweb website for visitors. |
