Shop Local: A Practical Pain-Free Guide to Shopping With Purpose

Shipping calculations have become much more sophisticated in the last few years. All up-to-date carts include two types of shipping calculations:. Having said that, shipping calculations from look-up tables that the merchant sets up can work perfectly well.

True, shipping costs may be a bit more or less than your table setting, but it should all average out in the long run. Carts often include a wide variety of shipping calculations, such as:. Generally, you have to select one system that applies to all your products, except that many carts allow you to add a shipping surcharge to selected products that are especially bulky or require special crates or shipping containers.

Each of the following provides a service to online merchants that estimates shipping costs, depending upon the type of service the customer selects such as next day, second day, ground, etc. Usually, the merchant has to sign up with each shipping service for this free service. Merchants can usually limit the shipping choices that they show to customers, even if the shipper offers other choices.

Account Options

Some, but not all, carts offer merchants the ability to offer a handling surcharge to cover shipping materials, etc. This involves four elements to prevent hackers from stealing sensitive credit card information:. Exceptions to this include: You can often find a payment gateway conveniently bundled with your merchant credit card account. To give you a quick idea of payment gateways that are compatible with the widest variety of shopping carts see the graph below:.

The most common payment gateways available — by US-based carts anyway — are: Is real-time credit card authorization really necessary? You can — perhaps. Nearly all carts provide the customer with both on-screen and e-mail receipts to confirm the purchase. Someone mistook your cart for his and left you with 20 boxes of gourmet fortune cookies.

In an online store, the shopping cart program must differentiate between shoppers — long before it tells you who it is at check-out time. Programs use several systems to track shopping carts:. However, the cookie approach is preferred, if possible, since it sometimes allows the shopper to retrieve his or her cart when logging on again. The better software products keep an online database of customers.

Some of these database-energized sites are able to personalize contact with customers, such as:. Nearly all carts have an online database that lists, at a minimum, SKU item number , product name, weight, and price. All of the product details are encoded into the HTML order button. When a customer clicks on the order button, the product information is transmitted to PayPal to initiate a transaction.

The danger of this approach is fraud. It is quite possible for an unscrupulous shopper to copy your product webpage, and do one of two things:. I use PayPal as an alternate payment method to sell my products without experiencing any of these problems. Most, but not all, carts allow you to maintain your database offline, and then upload it to your cart when changes occur. You can still make changes online using a web interface if you like. But, if so, you need to be able to download the entire product database, including your changes.

Yesterday I spoke with a woman who is having trouble with the shopping cart her web hosting service sold her. She needs to move to different cart — and a different hosting service. If she can download her product database and upload it to a new cart, she can transport her store with a minimum of downtime. Sure, redesigning a new cart is a pain-in-the-neck. But for my friend, the crucial element is her product database: Before you purchase a cart, check to see how easy it is to upload a product database. Also, make sure you have an exit strategy — make sure you can download your product database in its entirety for back-up purposes or to move to another cart.

Active online stores work hard at driving sales through various promotions. How do you put an item on sale? Another promotional approach is to offer coupon discounts via e-mail to your customers or subscribers to your list. Look carefully at the specific features of several stores before making your final decision, as features vary. Some to look for include:. For many stores discounts can be had with or without a coupon for the period of a sale.

Most people do not know how to spot a locally owned business from a national chain store.

The better carts allow you to set up tiered pricing on specific products: B2B stores usually offer customer pricing. Customers identify themselves via their private login passwords. At the most basic level these customers receive a set percentage discount on their order forms at checkout. At the very least, a merchant needs to be able to mark a product as complete, pending, back-ordered, drop-shipped, split, etc.

He should also send e-mail to the customer when the product is shipped or when there is a change to the order. Ideally, an order management system should be able to print invoices, packing slips, address labels, etc. Finally, the orders should be able to be imported directly into your accounting program. However, the ideal is usually only partly realized.

There are several ways smaller merchants deal with this:. You enter the total number of products you possess and the program subtracts from this number each time a sale is made. The program alerts you via e-mail when a low-inventory threshold is reached and again when inventory is exhausted. When the inventory reaches zero you can elect to either 1 inform customers that the item is out-of-stock and not allow a purchase or 2 accept the purchase and back-order the product.

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A couple of small business programs can indicate how soon a product is likely to be shipped, depending upon stock or distributor availability. The best programs provide ways to tie into real-time corporate inventory systems. Many programs provide some reports on products viewed and purchased. One of the best in this regard is Yahoo! Most online stores allow you to track sales between dates, but have nowhere near the detail of Yahoo!. All cart software that helps you manage your online catalog provides ways to upload product images and place them on a product page.

The product database will indicate the filename of each graphic associated with it. A few programs simplify your work by automatically creating thumbnail photos from your existing product photos. Sometimes they also show up in the cart so the customer can literally see what he or she has ordered. These thumbnails can then be used on sectional pages so the customer can browse visually. Small stores with 20 or so products can get away with a simple menu on the main page, with perhaps a small photo icon of the product.

Click on the icon and it takes you to the product. But the more products you have, the more important is a well thought out navigation system. The best systems offer not just one, but many different navigation systems:. Better systems allow you to place a product in several categories, so it can be found in several contexts.

How Does Shopping Cart Software Work? | Practical Ecommerce

Ideally, your goal is to allow your shopper to find any product in the store within three clicks using your category system. To design a coordinated, customer-friendly system, your product catalog needs to be very flexible. While ordering-only systems may need merely a product name, SKU product number , price, and weight, catalog-management systems can contain a great deal of information about a product.

The last feature I want to highlight is the ability to sell digital products such as e-books and software. Living in — dine. Home About Us Contact Us. Posted on April 5, by carolannglover Leave a comment. Search for Real Estate Follow Blog via Email Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

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