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Small Business Shopping Carts Are Big!

October 19, 2008

by Kirt Christensen

How do you define a small business? Is it a business with little cash flow? Is hundreds of dollars a day considered \”little\”? Certainly not when your products are one-cent stuff. So if you’re looking at finding the right shopping card for your small business, you must first examine – what is your business?

Do you make hundreds of sales in a week? Are your website analytics showing thousands of hits in that same week? Is that traffic being under-utilized due to poor management? Or do you have only a few sales. Out-of date and under-used website. Customers who you can talk to like friends. You will choose a different shopping cart depending on which category your business fits into.

Even with a simple search you can find lot’s of results for Ecommerce shopping carts. But what exactly are you looking for when you’re searching for a shopping cart? Maybe you want something that lets people quickly choose and buy a product.

Or, maybe you would like to give the shoppers more choice – \”Add to Cart\”, \”Remove from Cart\” – or maybe even the option to communicate with a live salesman during the process. All of these are features that greatly improve your image with the customer.

By now you’re probably getting curiousa what’s the best choice for a shopping cart for my \”small\” business? Well, the first question is, of course, whatas your budget? Obviously there will be a difference in cost depending on which category your business is in. Your shopping cart could be your only chance to interact with and impress the customer. Often a satisfied customer will return many times. How much of a premium would you be prepared to pay for that?

And you will also have to consider – how much are you prepared to charge your customers for the use of your cart? Often, postage and service charges will scare off the customers. Make sure the extra service charges are still within the bounds of what your customer will accept.

Sometimes a customer might be looking to buy more than one item at once. Unfortunately, with all your fancy functionality built in you might have a hard time getting them to concentrate – having to switch between cart and store all the time. If you could build in functionality to manage the cart in the background, your customer will be able to move from sale to sale very quickly – resulting in increased revenue for you and enhanced customer satisfaction.

So basically, if you’re looking at what’s the best shopping cart for your small business, the answer lies in working out how long you will want your \”small\” business to stay small. Of course every Large business started off small, but they also had a clear focus on what the customer wants. If you choose a well-designed, easy-to-use shopping cart, maybe you’ll get enough customers to go big too.

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