Choosing an Ecommerce Shopping Cart


Choosing an online shopping cart is a big decision. Unlike a traditional brick and mortar business, your website is your only chance to impress potential customers. It needs to project a professional image to capture the trust of your visitors. The shopping cart is a particularly important part of your website because it deals with people's personal information and credit card numbers. People are nervous about online purchases and need to be assured that they are giving their credit card numbers to a reputable company.

There are several types of ecommerce shopping carts available. They range from merchant services, which require no programming skills, to fully integrated shopping carts that require custom programming. The three main categories of shopping carts are:

  • Merchant services such as eBay and 2Checkout

  • Hosted shopping cart services

  • Fully integrated shopping carts

Merchant Services

Most shopping carts require you to have your own merchant account and gateway. A merchant account is a bank account that allows a business to conduct credit card transactions and the gateway allows the transaction to be conducted over a secure connection. It's okay if you don't have a merchant account or gateway. Merchant service shopping carts allow you to use their merchant account, gateway and shopping cart for a higher cost.

Merchant services are beneficial for very small businesses or those that are just starting and don't have a lot of orders. Merchant services provide the merchant account, gateway, hosted shopping cart and will maintain your customer's personal information. They usually require a set-up fee between 50 and 200 dollars, transaction fee between 30 and 75 cents, and 5% to 10% of each transaction. Because you are using their merchant account, your customer's credit card statement will show the merchant services business name not yours. In some cases, customers will not recognize the charge and may dispute it.

Merchant service shopping carts have an administrative interface, which allows you to login to your account to add products, prices and shipping options. The shopping cart generates the html for the purchase buttons and you simply copy and paste the html into your web pages. When your customer clicks on the purchase button, he is taken to another website to enter the credit card information. This indicates to the customer that you are a small business. Some potential customers will abandon the shopping cart rather than enter their credit card information on a website they know nothing about.

Once your business grows to the point where you are processing over $1000 a month, it's more cost effective to apply for your own merchant account and switch to either a hosted shopping cart (little or no programming) or a fully integrated shopping cart (programming required).

Hosted Shopping Cart

The hosted shopping cart is a great solution for a small business that is processing over $1000 a month but does not have the resources to create or customize a fully integrated shopping cart. Hosted shopping carts are similar to the merchant services because they provide an administrative interface for you to enter products, pricing and shipping options. They will generate the html for the purchase buttons, which can be copied and pasted into your html pages.

Hosted shopping carts face some of same problems as merchant service carts because your customers will be transferred to a different website to enter the credit card information. Some hosted shopping carts allow you to customize the shopping cart so that it has the same look and feel as your websites. Customizing your shopping cart may require some programming skills, but it could also prevent customers from abandoning their shopping carts.

The main difference between the merchant services shopping cart and the hosted shopping cart is the name that appears on the customer's credit card and pricing. Hosted shopping carts allow you to use your own merchant account and gateway, which means the customer's credit card statement will show your business name next to the charge. This can decrease your charge backs.

If you are using your own merchant account and conducting over $1000 of transitions each month, the hosted shopping carts can be less expensive than merchant services. Your merchant account will probably charge a monthly fee between 20 and 60 dollars, transaction fee between 10 and 50 cents, and a percentage of the transaction, usually ranging between 2% to 3.5%. In addition to the merchant fees, your shopping cart service will also charge a monthly fee between 10 and 30 dollars and could charge a transaction fee. These fees sound more expensive than the merchant service option, but if you are processing over $1000 a month and growing, it's better to pay flat monthly fees than continue to be charged 5 to 10 percent of the each transaction.

Fully Integrated Shopping Carts

The fully integrated shopping cart is a great option for any business that can afford it. The shopping cart will be dynamic and will have the same look and feel as your website. The ZIP Baby Potty Training Store is a great example of a fully integrated shopping cart. Fully integrated shopping carts like this contain features that are not found in merchant service or hosted shopping carts. For example, you can discount items, display customer reviews, assign products to multiple categories, display out of stock notifications, sort products and prices, and display shipping estimates without requiring the customer to create an account.

Integrated shopping carts require advanced programming skills and can often be used with your own merchant account or with a service that allows you to use their merchant account for a higher fee. There are many integrated shopping carts available. Free carts require the most programming skills, but if you don't have the programming skills necessary to customize a free shopping cart, there are many companies that specialize in customizing fully integrated shopping carts.

Your choice of a shopping cart can have a dramatic impact on your business. Your website is the first and only impression you get to make so you'll want to make it as professional as possible. While shopping for a shopping cart system, put yourself in your target customer's shoes and browse the Internet. Review your competitor's websites as well as those outside your industry. Make a list of shopping carts that you find appealing and research them thoroughly before choosing one.

Copyright 2004 Danna Henderson. All Rights Reserved.

About The Author

Danna Henderson started ZIP Baby in order to provide parents with comprehensive potty training information and a large selection of potty training products.


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Grow your Business with Emarketplace - Part III - Ecommerce
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Grow your Business with Emarketplace - Part III


Increase Company Productivity

After years of hard work, finally your business started to pick up. You are selling more products then ever! You have lined up a good number of suppliers and buyers. Things have never been better than now. Except one thing! With rising sales your overhead and supply chain expenses are also sky-rocketing. Your profit margin is no longer the same as it used to be! You feel that you are in a limbo! How to increase productivity? How to cut costs without giving up sales?

Sounds familiar to you? Well, your company is not alone! According to IDC, a research firm, while interviewed, overwhelming majority of the company executives claimed that their biggest concern is declining profit margins.

Companies, in order to stay competitive, must find solutions to increase efficiency in business operations and control costs. Is there a solution to this ubiquitous problem?

Remember Dorothy from the children classic "Wizard of the Oz"? She had to go through numerous obstacles in her quest to find a way to get back to Kansas, her home. Only to find out that the silver shoes that she was wearing from the very first day since the cyclone brought her to the Land of Oz could have taken her back home, all she had to do was to knock the heels together three times and command the shoes to carry her wherever she wished to go.

Similar to this story, solutions to these corporate problems are widely available right under your nose, only you as a company executive have to overcome the fear of new technologies and adopt them to your own good.

B2B exchanges or emarketplaces are capable of solving many key problems that corporations are facing today. Emarketplaces can provide immense opportunities to automate supply chain process, increase operational efficiency, reduce overhead costs and expand market at a minimal cost.

Using emarketplace effectivelyTwo primary factors of company productivity are Revenue Increase and Cost Cutting. Both are achievable if a company seriously decides to incorporate emarketplace features in all aspects of business operations. That means if as a company you want to reap all the benefits of emarketplaces, you have to commit yourself seriously.

Become a memberOnce you find an emarketplace that suits your requirement, the first thing what you have to do is to register and become a member.

Most emarketplaces have different membership packages. Although, to check out the emarketplace - whether it is viable for your business or not - you might start with the free membership package, but once you are satisfied with your selection, to use the emarketplace to your advantage you should choose the package with most features and functions.

Integrate your products to e-catalogIf you are a supplier, this is a very important step to take. Unless you have thousands of products to sell, this should not be a difficult task. All emarketplaces use either a form or wizard-based, not-so-complex and user-friendly product adding tool. Since e-catalogs that emarketplaces use are industry standard, once you aggregated you products, same information you will be able to use in other e-catalogs, emarketplaces and even in your own website.

Apart from your own buyers other prospective customers from the emarketplace community are able to view your products in the e-catalog, which in turn will bring you new contacts and sales.

Create products for sale offers You should create sales offer of your primary products that you carry most of the time and post them on the emarketplace. Many emarketplaces have options to sell products with different procedures. You can make offer to sell access inventories through dynamic market, also called auction, you can make hot offers with time limit, etc.This is an extra sales channel in the beginning, which might grow into your primary one!

Involve your buyers and sellersIf you would like to use an emarketplace most effectively, youhave to get your suppliers and buyers on board too. Supply chain management solution that usually comes with an emarketplace allows you to reduce operational costs significantly.

- Encourage your buyers to send request for quote for a product through the inbuilt system of the emarketplace.
- Make strict rules within your company to send all quotes exclusively through emarketplace.
- Ask your buyers to send Purchase Orders to your company via emarketplace.
- Bill all your clients using invoicing system of the emarketplace.
- Manage shipping and handling though emarketplaces.
- Convince your suppliers to use the same emarketplace so that even as a buyer you can get the benefits of a B2B exchange.

Complete adoption of an emarketplace will help a company gain numerous benefits. The following figures taken from various research notes emphasize the importance of e-marketplace in today's business world.

- Thanks to emarketplace, companies can reduce purchase order processing cost from US $75 to less than US $10.
- By automating sales and customer support processes companies can lower overhead costs up to 25 - 30% easily.
- Companies also can reduce more than five percent of their maintenance, repair and operation by incorporating e-business solutions, which are integral parts of any emarketplace.
- Business process automation using B2B emarketplace helps companies decreasing of document errors from 20 percent to less than one percent.

B2B Emarketplace solutions are great opportunities

The famous inventor Thomas Edison once told, "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."

Company executives are by no means afraid of hard work, but unfortunately many of them have colossal fear of high technology and because of this reluctant to explore new Internet-based technologies to their advantage. If you are one of them, be assured that knowledge required to adopt emarketplace to your business and manage it properly is easy to learn and implement.

Nowshade Kabir is the founder, primary developer and present CEO of Rusbiz.com. A Ph. D. in Information Technology, he has wide experience in Business Consulting, International Trade and Web Marketing. Rusbiz is a Global B2B Emarketplace with solutions to start and run online business.You can contact him at mailto:nowshade[at]rusbiz.com, http://ezine.rusbiz.com, http://www.rusbiz.com

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