Must have 6 Features While Choosing an eCommerce Shopping Cart

A business retailer is supposed to perform the tasks of online marketer. It is not the factor of sales that determines about the success or failure of the online business, but it is the promotional plan that determines about it.

However, in order to market your brand, all you need to select a perfect Ecommerce platform, so that purchasers of your brand could have better experience while using shopping cart of selected framework. In order to identify the key needs online store, I am sharing six ‘must haves’ that will be helpful to you in the selection of appropriate platform your online business as well as promotional plan. One thing should be in your mind while choosing open source eCommerce shopping carts like Magento, Prestashop, opencart and many others that helps you to extent your store functionality with their extensions like Magento Shop by Brand extension, Magento follow up emails extension etc. If you are already stepped into Ecommerce field and your shopping cart isn’t having the features that I am going to discuss in this article, then you should be keep looking for such features as they will be useful in making eStore ideal for online shopping.

If you are already stepped into Ecommerce field and your shopping cart isn’t having the features that I am going to discuss in this article, then you should be keep looking for such features as they will be useful in making eStore ideal for online shopping.

1.       SEO Friendly:

The first thing that struck our mind, when we discuss Ecommerce marketing is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that allows storeowners to create interesting content, as it offers less affect of technology on search engine indexing. Therefore, such need makes imperative for online business to choose framework that is not only SEO friendly, but also supports Content Management System (CMS). The CMS features online store with URL rewriting that includes titles and keywords in the addresses of WebPages; presence of such feature benefits your Ecommerce store with good search engine ranking and revenue.

2.       Coupon Codes:

Money saving offer attracts customers and coupon codes is one of the great ways that help in the promotion of web-store. By the start of 2009, it was reported on some blogs that online coupons would gain attention of customers. An ideal Ecommerce framework should offer coupon codes, as they assist in increasing the purchasers of Ecommerce store. Honestly speaking, I don’t recommend about shopping cart that doesn’t offer coupon codes.

3.       RSS Feed:

Just like its name, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a set of data formatting that makes page content syndication easier. This tool is useful in promotion of webpage content, and allows you to offer discount feeds to potential customers, which they could use in a reader & news aggregator. If you submit RSS feed to Twitter-feed, then you can receive feed about all new commodities, inventory alerts, coupon codes, and other news that are posted on Twitter, Google Plus, FaceBook, Identi.ca, MySpace and any other social website. RSS feed uses MailChimp Email service to generate subscription messages or Email alerts.

You should opt for that Ecommerce platform that enables you to generate RSS feeds on different product categories, new product arrivals, discounted products, coupons, special commodities etc., consider the aspect of RSS feed while selecting an Ecommerce platform.

4.       Multiple Image Handling:

Promoting your product through fine images is one the efficient marketing approach. A product page must be containing multiple images of product from different angles, the images provided in product page should also include image zooming and image panning to clearly display different aspects of product.

It should be kept in mind that selected Ecommerce platform should offer handling of multiple images and extend to third party plugin, like WordPress canvas drawing add-on that allows users to create and edit product images by the help of basic drawing tool on any website.

5.       Cross-Sells:

Cross selling is a promotional strategy that allows you to offer more related products to your customers, so that no. of sales on online store could be increased. It is a very fruitful approach, and help in retailing more products that ultimately increases the revenue of store. For instance, a website selling fashionable shoes can offer a matching dress or suite as a cross-sell.

The shopping cart that you chose for online store should automatically allow you to offer cross selling on products. An ideal Ecommerce framework should be dynamically capable to associate related products with a particular product page or checkout page.

6.       Customer Reviews:

Good customer reviews promote the conversions on merchandising store; it just behaves like a peer that recommends particular product or website. You can consider it as a medium that markets your merchandise in front of customers.

The selected shopping cart should include feature that allows your customers to post reviews, the review feature on site should be handled through self-review system or through third party review plugin.

I hope you might get benefit through above suggested points, while you adopt particular platform. Please feel free to share your views.