How Do You Go About Comparing Shopping Cart Software?
Anyone who desires a successful Internet business understands the importance of a good shopping cart. There are so many shopping carts online now that it can be difficult to wade through all your choices to locate the one that will work best for you.
One way of knowing which shopping cart is best for you is to read shopping cart product reviews that you can find online and in IT magazines. Read about what others think of the shopping carts, make note of the features discussed and compare what is offered to what you need.
Another way to find what is the best shopping cart software for your business is to do some comparison-shopping yourself using a list of what you need in a shopping cart and your budget.
When you have pared down the possible candidates to just a few, then it is time to look at live stores that use each of the candidates shopping cart programs. Notice how easy or not it is to navigate, search for products, add to or delete products from the shopping cart and the features available for the customer. Look to see if the shopping cart software companies offer a customer service and give them a try to see how they respond to you.
When you are paring down your list of possible shopping cart candidates do it by comparing price, feature, and by reading the reviews of each shopping cart. Look for the shopping carts that seem to be up to date on the latest technology, are easily integrated with payment processors and your Website. Make sure you discard the shopping carts that are older or have lower quality.
When investigating live stores that use the various shopping carts that you have pared down your candidates to you want to get a feel for how the shopping carts work when in use. Typically the shopping cart companies will provide a list of several online stores that use their shopping cart. Some of the things you will be looking for are how well the shopping cart blends in with the Website and does each store look different from the others? Actually use the shopping carts on these stores to see how the carts perform.
When filtering out the candidates use a list of the top 3 things that you are looking for in a shopping cart and if a candidate does not have one of the top 3 than cross it off your list. Make a list of the features that are important to you and which ones you cannot do without this will help to narrow down your list of candidates.
If you know you will be using electronic certificates that cross off any shopping carts that do not offer this feature.
Make sure you investigate how good each company’s customer service department is by sending them each an email asking some pre-sale questions and make notes about how fast they respond, if they respond with a canned reply or really give you individual attention.
Do the candidate shopping cart companies have technical support? Take a look at the FAQs and index of help topics to see how helpful they are and if they are easy to understand. Download the user guide and review it to see if it is understandable.
Read shopping cart review from respected sources to see what is recommended. See if you can find user reviews on each of the shopping carts that you have decided are the biggest contenders for your money.
Once you have your list narrowed down to just 3 or 5 shopping cart software companies than it is time to look at the total cost of using each shopping cart, and also look at what the strong points are for each of the remaining carts.
Look at price, features and support and make your best decision.
