Converting More Customers With A Shopping Cart
You’ve set up a website, built an e-mail blast list, researched great keywords and are following your SEO strategies, now how do you turn all that hard work into more customers? If you are in a service business it’s simple – just make sure that you have your contact information clearly presented on your website. If you are selling tangible goods, it takes a bit more work.
The key to converting web visits to sales is to make the process as easy as possible. The best way to achieve that is with a good shopping cart. Many new internet marketers think they can’t afford a nice shopping cart. The truth is that you can’t afford not to have one! There are many excellent shopping carts out there that will have you up and running in no time.
One of the biggest is Google Checkout. Checkout provides a pretty robust shopping cart set up and your only expense is a percentage of your sales. For a smaller merchant just getting started that’s only 2.9% + $.30 per transaction. The only way you pay is if you make sales, so there is no up front risk. The set up is easy and the process for the customer is intuitive and simple. That is important because your customers will have little patience for a difficult check-out process. Don’t make it difficult for them to give you money! Amazon offers a very similar set up at a very similar rate. It really comes down to the one you are most comfortable with.
Yahoo also offers a starter package, but theirs has a monthly fee of about $30.00 plus 1.5%. If you know you will have a good amount of sales right out of the gate, you may save some money going with a flat fee and smaller percentage like Yahoo’s. The set up and interface are also very good, so the fee structure is the biggest difference in my opinion.
The only downside to these big providers is that sometimes they aren’t customizable enough for niche businesses. If your business has very specific and unusual shopping cart needs, you will probably need to go with a company that specializes in customizable shopping carts. One we have worked with is 1shoppingcart.com. Their system isn’t quite as easy to set up as some of the big boys but you can get in deep and make it work exactly like you want it to.
One thing I would strongly discourage is hiring a company to build you a custom cart – at least at first. The truth is that there are carts up and running right now that will satisfy any business. It is far easier to find them than to start from scratch. Also avoid the thousands of “Free” shopping carts you will find while you are searching for yours. You never know who they are and remember at some point you will probably need to share some financial information with them if you want to get paid. Stick with well known suppliers with a good track record. There are plenty of them available.
So go ahead and dive in. Nothing will help you convert more customers than a good shopping cart!
