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Q&A with VECTEC’s Megen McMichael on Shopping Cart Systems The shopping cart system has become the heart of where business is done online. Learn what features are considered must-have for small businesses, as well as other helpful tips on graphics, client customization and readying your shopping cart for the busy holiday shopping season. Q. What do you consider to be “basic features” for the standard small business shopping cart? A. Basic features would be being able to divide your products into related categories, such as holiday products. Having images if at all possible – I know for some smaller companies that can be problematic but I find it to be critical because that is what is going to sell your product in the long run. Good descriptions of your product – because again the pictures and the descriptions are really going to sell your product. An add to cart button so you can actually buy the product. A basic check-out feature, whether it is a simple form that you can collect billing, shipping and credit card information. It doesn’t even have to be a login – A lot of sites you have to log in to complete the check-out process, but as far as basic you could have just a simple form. Q. What do you mean by a “basic shopping cart”? A. A basic shopping chart is adequate for businesses that may only be selling ten products. For example, one of our clients, Stacy’s Southern Breeze, which sells note cards was selling ten different variations of card packs. As a result, we created static pages describing those and with a simple button customers were directed to an order form that could be filled out that included how many the customer wanted of each and a click to order. Q. What about advanced features? A. The key advanced features would include a login – my account section – where you could have a profile and it would remember your previous orders. Being able to have related items so you could relate items to products, so if you had a shirt and you knew that a pair of slacks would go good with it you would relate the pair of pants to the shirt. Viewing the cart as you shop so you can tally your order. Being able to accept promotional codes, e-coupons, and gift certificates. Having inventory tracking so it would tell you if it was in stock, or out-of-stock so the customer would have the option of not purchasing it if it was out-of-stock. One last good feature businesses might want to think about are color swatches – like if you’re shopping for something that is available in multiple colors you can click on the color swatch and see what the item looks like in red, green, blue, etc. Q. Many businesses are surprised when they first set up a shopping system by the number of costs involved – could you briefly detail what are some of the typical costs a small business can expect to encounter throughout the process? A. The first would be paying for a full-blown shopping cart - the database driven solution - which could run anywhere from a couple hundred dollars to several thousand dollars depending on how advanced the shopping cart. An off the shelf product will certainly be cheaper but it is not customizable, whereas a database driven developed shopping cart is a lot more customizable and will cost you more. The second cost you can expect is the cost of photography services of your products. Many businesses may opt to take the photos themselves, which is fine. This is a business decision – the business has to decide how important it is to them if they want to spend the money. The third cost relates to banking – setting up an e-merchant account – where there will be a per month fee and transaction fees, which can range to a set fee to a percentage of the transaction. This cost can be alleviated through manual processing as opposed to real time processing. In manual processing, the credit card is encrypted and sent in the form of an email to the business and the business handles entering the credit card manually. A business will also need to purchase a secure server certificate – they usually run about $200 a year and can be purchased from VeriSign, Thawte, GeoTrust, etc. Q. How important do you think imagery is when it comes to the shopping cart – what do you like to see in terms of graphics? A. I think it is very important – the pictures are what will sell the product. My recommendation is that people spend money to get good photos. You can go to a website and tell which ones were taken by a store clerk. I like the view larger on a page – so the pictures that are taken have to be large enough to be scaled appropriately so that you can view them larger or view them smaller. It is also starting to become more common to include a zoom-in capability – where you can zoom in on the detail of a product, like a belt buckle for instance. So I think all that is important because it helps consumers pick exactly what they want. Q. What factors are important when tying your shopping cart into your backend systems? A. The important thing here is before starting the shopping cart, determine what information you need to come out of the shopping system – what fields are important and then create an export into the system. That is basically what we do when we have a shopping system – We do it with Whitley’s Peanuts and with the Smithfield Catalog sites – We select certain fields out of the database that match up with fields in their inventory system or accounting system and then we export out every hour or day depending upon the need and then it gets dumped into their system. This is something that can also be varied depending upon the season. Additional exports can be pulled during the holiday season. A good shopping cart system will also allow you to have a re-export function so that it something happened to your initial export you could re-export it if you needed to. Q. Client customization is another big factor to consider when evaluating your shopping system needs. What do you recommend – i.e. allowing customer login access to past order history and package tracking, providing filled in billing and shipping address preferences, etc.? A. Package tracking, definitely. In fact, we are reviewing a package tracking module that ties into UPS. Order status is also important – what I mean by this is have they processed the order yet, is it in a box, or is it waiting to be picked up? A quick check out without a login. Some people are uncomfortable having their information stored so if you just wanted to do a quick check out where you filled out your billing and shipping information and then process the order without having to log in that may be something that people want as well. The downside to that is that the next time you come to the website to order something your information won’t be stored but some people prefer to shop that way. Storing credit card information – I know Amazon does it so when you go to shop there you can pick a credit card. Wish lists – being able to have wish lists. Reviewing products – where people can do reviews of products. Registries – also, do they need gift packaging? Do they need personalization, engraving, monogramming? Q. What additional factors/issues should merchants consider in order to assist them with the busy online holiday season? A. When shipping out for the holiday you want to make sure that you have established cut-off dates and you’ve worked those out with UPS so you know that UPS can get your product out in time for the holiday. Many of our customers also update their products to reflect their holiday merchandise – they create a holiday category on their website so people can quickly get to the holiday items. Many businesses also step up search engine campaigns during the holidays. Q. Amazon was the pioneer of the one click shopping cart system. Its online store is thought to be one of the best in the business – what other merchants do you think have superior systems – ones that small businesses might want to try and emulate? A. Barnes and Noble has a really good shopping cart system. I think it is similar to Amazon. It is very efficient and fast and has a lot of information. I also think Pottery Barn is good – they have some additional features. I like the way they have all their products listed on each page. Under each product they have a box and you just check the products that you want to add to the shopping cart, then you check add to shopping cart once. You don’t have to click add to shopping cart for every item. I really like the way that they do that because when you’re placing an order, you may be ordering a couple of things at once and that’s really convenient. How most shopping carts work – when you click add to cart, it takes you to the cart page and then you have to go back to continue shopping. The other thing that I liked about the Pottery Barn website and I believe Amazon does this too, as well as Barnes & Noble - is that it tells you up at the top of the page how far along you are in the check-out process. It tells you step one, billing information. Step two- shipment information. Step three – payment. Step four – confirmation or review. I also wanted to mention a feature on Amazon that I like – its called Amazon Prime. It’s a membership program and what people do is pay an annual fee – It’s $79 a year and includes as much shipping as you want. Q. Any additional thoughts? A. Other things I might mention that businesses should think about are a search for products. Its also important that you provide multiple shipping methods – not just standard – you also need to provide second day, overnight, etc. You accept multiple credit cards. Taxing – you handle taxes appropriately. The last thing is if you choose to set up an e-merchant account, you have to make sure that the bank has e-commerce capability. For additional questions on shopping cart design, call VECTEC at (757)594-7092. |
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