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Shopping Carts
"Seven Key Questions to Help You Find The Shopping Cart That Can Potentially DOUBLE Your Sales!"
This Fact Sheet has been put together to help companies who are trying to figure out what kind of shopping cart is best for their businesses. The right type of shopping cart can be critical to the success of your e-Business venture, especially since the right shopping cart has the potential to MORE THAN DOUBLE YOUR SALES!
You may already be aware, but "shopping cart abandonment" is a serious problem - 55% of online shoppers have abandoned carts. And the main reason these prospects desert their selections before actually completing their purchases is because they are frustrated with the shopping cart itself.
Shoppers abandon carts when...
- They can't browse through your products freely
- They can't find pricing and product information easily
- There are too many forms to fill out and the process takes too long
- The cart loads too slowly
Obviously, if you want to streamline your ordering process by adding a shopping cart to your website, then it's critical that you choose one that will be user-friendly for shoppers.
The "right" shopping cart can result in 55% more shoppers actually completing their purchases! And this means 55% MORE PROFITS IN YOUR POCKETS!
However, choosing a shopping cart can be an extremely difficult (and confusing!) decision, especially for those of you who are just struggling to understand what one actually is!
SO, WHAT EXACTLY IS A SHOPPING CART?
A virtual shopping cart is a lot like the metal one at the supermarket - with a whole lot of features added on. The virtual cart collects the products that visitors to your site have an interest in purchasing, and shoppers can "add" or "remove" items as they please, just like with a real shopping cart.
But then the virtual cart takes on other duties. It first calculates the total of the customer's order, including taxes and shipping costs. Then, when the customer is ready to make a purchase, the cart passes all of this information over a secure site (a "payment gateway") to your merchant account, where credit cards are approved or rejected.
Once the shopping cart hears back from the merchant account, it:
- Generates a customer receipt and e-mails it to the customer,
Then - Sends you a fax or an encrypted e-mail that contains the customer details and order information.
... And at that point, you can fill the orders.
If you sell only one or two items and don't plan to add more, you don't really need a shopping cart - you can use a simple order form instead. But if your e-business is just a bit bigger than this, or if you plan to expand at any time in the future, you'll want to have a good shopping cart in place.