Shopping Carts

Once you have found a drop shipper, you’ll need a way to present products to potential customers, allow them to add those products to a shopping cart, and allow them to make an actual purchase. In short, you will need some type of shopping cart system. Unforunately, this is where things get confusing.

Back in the early days of e-commerce (the mid 90’s) if you wanted a shopping cart system, you hired a programmer to build you one - this was usually a very expensive proposition. While you can still hire a programmer to develop a custom shopping cart for you, today you are far better off using one of the very good shopping carts that already exist.

What Should You Look For In A Shopping Cart?

Shopping cart systems, like most things, offer a tradeoff between price and functionality/features. Start with your wishlist - what are all of the things you would want in a cart? Check out your favorite Web sites and see what they offer. Check out the big guns (i.e., Amazon.com, etc.) and see how they do it. Once you have your list, divide it into those things you must have and those that would be nice.

The must haves are usually obvious. You MUST have a way to display items. You MUST have a way for users to add items to the cart (don’t forget about product options like color, size, etc.). You MUST have a good checkout system that supports the type of payments you want to accept.

There are many features which are nice to have, but depending on your business may not be a MUST. Some of the more popular features include: one page checkout, search engine optimization, customer wish lists, automated drop shipping (more on this in a future post), and the ability to handle multiple currencies.

The Shopping Cart Industry

I generally break down the shopping cart industry into 4 levels. The first level are entry level carts from major vendors - like eBay and Yahoo. These are solid, inexpensive carts, but they are difficult to customize. The next level are entry level carts from shopping cart companies. These solutions are also inexpensive, but allow for greater customization. The third level are mid-range carts. These carts are more expensive, but also offer more features and the ability to customize. Finally, there are the high end carts. These carts are very expensive and are typically only used by companies with $1 million plus in annual revenue.

Over the next few weeks I will review offerings in each of these categories and make some recommendations.

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