Improve Your Shopping Cart
If you want visitors to your site to use your shopping cart you need to make improvements to the usability of the cart and to make the purchase process as simple and short as possible.
Did you know that the checkout process is where more sales are lost than any other time during the buying process? Check your analytics and see if you have a large number of individuals leaving your site before finishing the checkout process, if this is happening than you know that you definitely need to make improvements. In order to determine where you need to make shopping cart improvements you can ask someone who is not familiar with your website to go through the process and check out the usability of your shopping cart. Ask them to specifically comment on how accessible the shopping cart is, if it is easy to use, if they ran into problems were they able to find instructions on how to use the cart, and did they find the shipping and payments methods that they prefer to use?
Investigate how easy it is to navigate around finding products. Do you have a search feature and does it give accurate results?
If you belong to any business forums ask members to rate your site and their shopping experience.
Ask yourself how organized your site is, how secure do people feel making purchases and how user friendly is the shopping experience on your site?
Your shopping cart is one of the most important parts of your Website. Periodically evaluating the shopping cart from a user’s point of view can improve not only your shopping cart but improve your sales as well.
Look at your shopping cart objectively does it meet all of your needs as the administrator? Can you manage all of the product fulfillment, payment and shipping needs in a timely manner without mistakes? Evaluate the hosting, customer service and technical support of the company who’s shopping cart you are using. How happy are you with the features? When upgrades are available is there an additional fee or are upgrades free to existing customers?
Does your shopping cart blend in well with your Website? Do you receive the information you need about your customers and their sales? Does your shopping cart have the capability to have an affiliate program, produce a newsletter or evaluate the shopping experience of your customers?
Does your shopping cart grow with your business or have you outgrown the shopping cart?
What do reviewers say about the shopping cart you are using? Can you find customer reviews of the shopping cart and if so, are they favorable?
After evaluating your shopping cart is customer service responsive to your need to make improvements? Do they give you suggestions or upgrades?
Seeing how important your shopping cart is to the success of your online business spending time evaluating how well your present shopping cart is performing and finding out what your customers think about your shopping cart is important and should be done on a regular basis.
