Evaluating Ecommerce Shopping Cart Software

A Home Business Article Contributed by Elizabeth Fox-Wise

Before Purchasing Ecommerce Shopping Cart Software be Sure to Evaluate a Few Choices

As is the case with most products and service, there are many different ecommerce software shopping carts from which to choose. The first step to choosing the one that is right for your ecommerce business is to review and evaluate several possible choices.

Before you started paying attention to the shopping carts at online shopping sites, you probably felt they were all pretty much the same. As a customer of ecommerce, you put items into your shopping cart and checked out your purchases without giving much thought to the ecommerce shopping cart software that you were using.

Although most online shopping carts look similar to the user, they really are not. When deciding which one to use for your ecommerce software, you should focus on the features that are the most important to you and not distracted by all of the other bells and whistles that some software might offer over another. During this first step, you will be able to weed out a lot of the choices by eliminating those that do not offer the features you have deemed as important.

Evaluating the Ecommerce Shopping Cart Software on Someone Else's Site

While you were narrowing your choice of ecommerce software down to those what offered your important features, did you notice that most of the software sites provide links to some of their clients who are using their software? They do! If you missed it, go back and look again because that is the next crucial step.

Take your narrowed down list of possible ecommerce software providers and return to their web sites. Find the area of their site where they give you a list of merchants using their ecommerce software. Go to those merchant's sites and check out their shopping carts! Pretend you are a customer and browse around their site picking scattered items to add to your shopping cart. Try doing everything that your customers will want to, and need to, do.

View your cart, remove an item from your cart, change the quantities of an item in your cart. Pay attention to the experience and how it makes you feel. Is there anything frustrating about the process or anything that does not work as it is intended. Then go on to the next site and test it all again! Continue this "role playing" form of software evaluation until you have visited a few clients from each ecommerce software provider you are considering.

Make Sure You Understand Everything before Committing to an Ecommerce Software Provider

Some of the software you are reviewing may be being marketed to you as a service (for example some web hosting sites will offer a hosted shopping cart as part of their service) and other might be marketed to you as a product for purchase where you will be buying the actual software. Some may have up front costs and then reoccurring costs. Others might be a one time purchase with no other costs. Do not be confused by all the options and programs being offered and when comparing two options be sure that you are not comparing apples to oranges.