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Off The Shelf Software
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If you are looking to open a retail site there are many off the shelf shopping cart and e-commerce packages that can be purchased and easily personalized.
These packages have customizable front-ends, so you can tailor your site to your own taste and requirements. Most have a complete backend management interface to allow for easy loading of products and further specific
customization.
Shopping cart software can be purchased inexpensively with a wealth of retail features; e-commerce software takes the whole process a little further and is maybe a consideration for more established players with extended features like CRM (customer relationship management), Analytics, Reporting and ROI-analysis (Return On Investment).
There are even a few freeware and shareware products on the market and I have heard many good reports about
oscommerce, which is an open source product, which means it’s free to use. I also understand that it’s search engine friendly, which will make your job easier when you undertake the search engine
optimization techniques mentioned later on in this publication.
There really are a lot of shopping carts to choose from and to say I have experience of all of them would not be true. I have actively used Actinic, J-Shop, Cactushop and OS-commerce and like all of these products in their own way.
Pakatak.co.uk is based on Cactushop5, which costs $200.00 for the first license
and $100.00 for any subsequent stores you wish to open. Cactushop has been
criticized for not being particularly search engine friendly but this has never bothered us, there is a ‘search engine friendly’ page generation feature that creates a separate HTML page for each of your products at the touch of a button. These pages can then be linked to a sitemap and
optimized for search engine traffic separately.
In my opinion, as long as the shopping cart product you use is easily customizable, functional, fast, and has all the features you require to run your business you can’t go too far wrong. The only reason I run most of my sites on Cactushop is because I’m familiar with it and it’s written in ASP (Active Server Pages) and having a knowledge of the language allows me to adapt parts of the code.
There are several review sites where people who use or have used the product can write appraisals. With most products, if I’m not already familiar with them, I tend to use review sites to gauge customer sentiment. In my experience I would have to agree with the expression “you can’t please all the people all of the time”. This is also true of review sites; allow for a product to have a couple of bad reviews and pay special attention to the bad reviews making sure that it’s constructive criticism. That said you should expect to see a healthy amount of good reviews. Check as many reviews as possible to make sure the product does not have problems with a particular area of functionality that you consider important to the operation of your business.
If you would like to research your own reviews simply search Google, Yahoo or MSN using expressions like: shopping cart reviews or E-commerce reviews
I have listed a couple of shopping cart review sites below:
Wilson Web – Reviews on over 150 E-commerce and shopping cart packages
Shopping cart reviews – Shopping cart comparison utility
When choosing your shopping cart decide what functionality is important to you, there are literally hundreds of packages available and the amount of information can be overwhelming.
One Shopping cart can look very similar to the next but there are distinct differences in the features they offer. Decide what features are most important and compile a list of programs that meet your criteria.
Look at other stores using the packages you have identified, most software vendors provide example stores, other operational websites that are based on their software. This will also give you some idea of how
customizable the interface is, look for diversities between the different example stores. If you’re feeling bold you could even contact one or two of the stores and ask how good, in their opinion the shopping cart is, how efficient any technical support required is transacted and if they have had any resolved or unresolved problems with the product.
How good is the customer experience? Choose a few stores that you like and make sure the store performs as you would expect. Look for smooth transition from home page to product pages, test the features you are interested in to make sure they function as required, carry out product and site searches, add items to the shopping cart, etc. If you use this software for your own store this will be your customer experience, is it up to scratch?
You also need to make sure that your products and product descriptions will fit into the space allocated. Look at the example stores and try to find products that are similar to your own.
Some of the suitable packages may be hosted shopping cart solutions, on-line store builders that include the hosting, web space, shopping cart facility and integrated credit card processing.
Make sure you calculate all the costs involved; hosted solutions are normally charged monthly and may include an initial set-up fee. If you are considering this type of solution make sure it is cost effective.
Yahoo runs one of the best-known store builder programs. The Yahoo program maybe a little more expensive than standard registration and hosting but it is very well documented and the biggest advantage is that Yahoo are one of the biggest internet search
facilities and without insinuating too much, they have an active interest in the amount and volume of sales your store generates.
Continue to Software
Development and build
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