ECommerce Business Technology Series, Part IV – Shopping Carts And Your Online Store

In, ECommerce Business Technology Series, Part III – From Client To Server, A Division Of Labor, we looked at both browser-based and server based web technology. That post wrapped up a series of three “basic background” posts on what a web page is from a technological standpoint and how they interact between the browser and web server. If you have not read those posts yet, I recommend that you go back and start with, ECommerce Business Technology Series, Part I – Getting Past The Fear Of Web Technology, and work your way up to this post, as it will give you the background information needed to help understand some of the terminology and principles described from here on out.

In this post we are going to talk about shopping cart systems.  Most of you know that a shopping cart system is used by your customers to add items to a ” virtual cart”  as they navigate through your store and select items to purchase.  Shopping carts can calculate shipping, manage inventory, facilitate the payment process and automate your sales confirmation and shipping notifications to your customers.   I won’t get into the details of how to set one up, but I will give you an idea of how they fit into your online store and some options that you should consider when looking for a shopping cart.

Shopping carts are nothing more than specialized software that integrates into your online store.  They are programming scripts, that reside on your server and they almost always integrate with a database that stores your products, shipping rules, and other configuration information.  Shopping cart software has come a long way in the last several years and they have become so sophisticated, there really isn’t any reason to try and code your own shopping cart anymore.  Options exists from free “open source” solutions to shopping cart systems that costs thousands of dollars.  Unless you are a multimillion dollar ecommerce company that has a significant IT budget and specialized needs, you should use one of the free or commercial versions available.   Coding your own shopping cart would take days, months, or years depending on how sophisticated your needs are.  Existing shopping cart software has been heavily tested and if you stay with the most common ones, continues to expand in features and provide support.

The most fundamental ecommerce technology decision you will make that has the most overall impact to your business is your choice of what shopping cart solution to implement.  Usually the first thing I see with inexperienced ecommerce entrepreneurs is their natural tendency to focus on the look of the site first, then the shopping cart second.  I have seen countless newbies start off their website by purchasing an ecommerce web template  (you know the predesigned ones you see in online template stores).  But the reality is, those are just  “webpage” templates for design, not the shopping cart itself.  To use those, you need a web designer to tie those template designs into a real shopping cart system.   When you consider your shopping cart of choice, remember that many of your backend operations (such as inventory, order fulfillment, notifications, payments, and other tasks are dependent upon the ability of your shopping cart to integrate with these systems, or provide those functions within the cart itself. Remember when looking at shopping carts during your research that “out of the box” product pages and checkout pages look very vanilla, and to get the most out of these systems you should be very well versed in web design, or else hire out someone to customize your site for you.

When researching shopping carts, look for those that contain the features you wish to support in your online store.  For example, one of the features that I look for is a cart’s ability to support online coupon codes.  I cross-promote my stores to Amazon and eBay customers by including coupon codes and marketing inserts with my shipments.  I also periodically run promotions and use coupon codes as a way to set up my promotions in my store.   But not all carts accept coupons.  This feature may not even be important to you.  But it was for me.  It wasn’t the most important feature for me, but one I cared about.  Since shopping cart features can number in the hundreds or even thousands, I won’t go into what you should or should not have when it comes to features within your shopping cart software.  You should create a list of must-haves, nice to haves, and find the cart that best matches your needs.  Now, having said that, lets talk about hosted versus non-hosted shopping carts.

Since shopping carts are the center of your ecommerce technology needs, many smaller online retailers choose hosted options where the hosted solution is an all-in-one type ecommerce platform.  Ecommerce providers such as Yahoo Stores, ProStores, 3DCart, and many more provide self-hosted solutions.  These sites basically come set up out of the box and allow you the ability to get an online store up and running quickly.  These are ok, but your store will have limitations without some serious customization and often the platform itself has limitations of just how much you can customize.  I have built stores on all three of the mentioned platforms, and with each, I had to pay extra for some serious customizations and design by finding developers with experience on those platforms. For example, Yahoo stores uses a proprietary tag format similiar to XHTML within its page templates (called RTML) to allow for customization of your site.  RTML is a 100% proprietary solution, so if you ever want to move your site off their platform to your own, you will need to rebuild your site.  But having said that, out of the top 500 online retail stores, more run on Yahoo platform that any other platform.  When I first heard that a few years back, I thought that was a pretty amazing feat.  But keep in mind Yahoo Stores offers some higher end enterprise plans that most starters do not need.

Hosted solutions are a great option for beginning and advanced ecommerce store owners alike.  The downside of these all in one solutions is often cost, or in some cases, additional fees per transaction depending on the plan or company you choose.  Just look at each plan carefully.  Also keep in mind that these are supported applications running on supported servers and are usually extremely stable.

Embedded and self-hosted shopping cart solutions are another option if you have access to a little bit of technical help.  Using shopping cart systems like Magento, OSCommerce, Zen Cart, etc gives you a cheaper option for the software itself, but keep in mind that you have to support the software yourself, or hire someone to do it for you.  However, you have total control of all your files and databases, so you can easily port them across most hosts.  Most ecommerce web design firms will build off one of the shopping carts because a lot of them are already a part of many hosting provider’s standard hosting packages.  It also gives the web programmer the most control by having access to the source code themselves.

So hopefully this has given you an idea of how to base your ecommerce website around the shopping cart system and a little background that you can use when researching which cart is best for you.  In my next post, ECommerce Business Technology Series, Part V – Hosting Your Online Store, I am going to talk about web hosting services. We’ll talk about shared servers, dedicated servers, and virtual servers.  Once you decide the shopping cart software you want to use, you’ll need to know how to shop for a hosting provider that can support your software decision.