No. 1: Pick an SEO-friendly Cart
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the first order of business in ecommerce marketing. While there are a lot of things that site owners can to do create interesting content, they have less control over technology’s effect on search-engine indexing. So choosing an SEO-friendly ecommerce content management system (CMS) becomes essential. A telltale sign of a good SEO-friendly CMS is how it rewrites URLs (web page addresses).
No. 2: Coupon Code Support
Nothing attracts customers like saving money, and coupon codes are a great way to promote your store. A good shopping cart platform should support coupon codes or other adjustable rate models right out of the proverbial box. Don’t use a cart that doesn’t offer coupons.
No. 3: RSS Capability
RSS, which is most often defined as really simple syndication, is simply a set of data formats that make it easy to syndicate page content.
This technology is a powerful tool for marketing. You can offer discount feeds that customers and potential customers will use in a reader or news aggregator. You can submit RSS feeds toTwitterfeed and have all of your new products, coupon codes, inventory alerts, or other specials effortlessly posted on Twitter, Facebook, iGoogle, MySpace, Identi.ca, or just about any other social networking site you can imagine. And you can even use RSS to generate alert emails using services like MailChimp.
Choose an ecommerce platform that generates RSS feeds for new products, special or discounted products, coupons, sale items, and product categories. Don’t consider a cart without RSS capability.
No. 4: Cross-selling Functionality
Cross selling is simply the idea of selling a customer more and related products to increase total per-checkout revenue. We’ve all seen cross selling done well. As an example, when a toy store recommends batteries to go with a battery-operated Elmo doll, we appreciate the reminder. Or, when an online fashion shop recommends shoes to accompany a suite or dress purchase, we appreciate that, too.
Your shopping cart should offer cross selling as an automated or semi-automated process. The best ecommerce platforms will have a system to associate products and then dynamically place related items on the proper product and checkout pages. If a cart doesn’t cross sell, don’t bother.
No. 5: Customer Reviews
Customer reviews encourage more sales. Psychologically, customer reviews are akin to having a peer recommend the product and the store. Think of it as a way to let your customers market for you — plain and simple.
Your shopping cart should integrate customer reviews, either supporting a review system itself or easily connecting to a third-party customer review tool like PowerReviews or similar.
No. 6: Product Sharing and Recommendations
A customer visiting your site should be able to email or otherwise share product details. Imagine that a teen is searching for clothes at some hip online shop. The teen finds the perfect pair of pants and wants to let, say, Uncle Bob know that this is what she really wants for her upcoming birthday. No smart ecommerce marketer is going to get in the way of that sort of communication. Rather, a good store should give the teen an easy way to send her important message to Uncle Bob without any messy cutting and pasting.
The best of carts include this sharing feature, usually as part of a wish list function that requires some form of registration.
No. 7: Multiple Images, Image Zooming
Sometime the very best ecommerce marketing you can do is to have great pictures of the product. Nearly every product detail page should offer several images of the product from different angles, and when it makes sense, include image panning or zoom to show specific details.
Your shopping cart should support multiple image and image manipulation; or at the very least, it should easily integrate with a third party product image solution like Zoomify.
No. 8: Manage Campaign Landing Pages
Pay-per-click advertising dominates many ecommerce marketing budgets. Marketers want to refine their ad copy, scrutinize keyword selection, and squeeze every ounce of ROI from their campaigns.
So don’t consider a cart that cannot manage campaign landing pages. Your shopping cart or platform should support custom, non-catalog pages. Some carts refer to these as “CMS pages,” others call them “landing pages,” but, regardless of what you name them, make sure your cart offers them.
Picking the Right Cart
So I have pointed out eight cart features that I believe are deal breakers. Of course, there are a lot of other things to consider when you select the web platform for your business. But with hundreds of carts to choose from (and dozens that include all of these features and more), you can be very selective.
What Is An Ecommerce Shopping Cart?
An ecommerce “shopping cart” can be defined as just the portion of your website that manages transactions, or the term can describe an ecommerce-specific content management system that stores product catalogs, monitors sales, and serves up database-driven content for just about every page in your site.
