What is the Best Shopping Cart Software for Your Ecommerce Website?

What Shopping Cart Features Should I Look For?

Most shopping carts come with standard features like unlimited categories and products, web-based administration, easy-to-use product creation screens, and tax and shipping calculation. Unfortunately, not all carts include all the functions YOUR business will need to operate an online store.

The following is a list of features to look for in a shopping cart:

Installation and Design

• Easy-to-use web interface: A web interface allows you to administer your shopping cart from any web browser that is connected to the internet.
• Shopping Cart Reporting: The ability to get detailed reports about your sales, inventory, users, categories, products, destination zones, taxes, shipping rates, orders, membership levels, etc.
• Multiple Languages: The ability to display multiple languages in your shopping cart
• Customer Support: Most carts usually provide email or forum-based support, but sometimes they provide live phone support.
• Upgradeable: Find out if you can get free updates as the software is improved. Usually you can get free updates for 12 months.
• Template-based Design: Tempate-based designs make it easier to customize the look of your website
• WYSIWYG Editor for Products: This feature allows you to enter product text and images using a word-processor-like editor.
• Content Pages: Does your cart allow you to create content pages? For example, can you create an “About Us” page?
• Mini-Cart: A mini cart is a small box that indicates if the user has items in their shopping cart. These are usually located on the top or side of the page. Most carts have this feature.

Customer Features

• Customer Order / Customer Account / Customer Registration: The ability for your customers to view their account and their order history.
• Product Search: A search tool for your products. This function is especially helpful if you have more than 20 or 30 products.
• Googlecheckout: Google Checkout is a new service that makes online shopping faster, safer and more convenient. Many carts have been updated so they work with Google Checkout.
• Wish list: A “Wish List” allows your customers to save products to a wish list. That way they can come back to your online store at a later date and buy the products in the Wish List.
• Send to friend: This feature displays a form that allows customer to enter a name and email address so they can send a link of a product to a friend.
• Memberships and special pricing: This feature allows you to create memberships on your store and then give them special prices or discounts.
• Printable Invoices: The feature allows your customers to print their invoices.
• Multiple Shipping Addresses: The feature allows customers to store multiple shipping addresses. This is a handy feature for customer who often ship gifts to friends and family members.
  
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