Transcript of this week’s video on eCommerce website options:

Bonjour. I am Virginie Dorn, the CEO of Business Website Center. We are a website design company located in California.

Today, we’re going to be taking about e-commerce options for your shopping cart. Not all shopping carts are created equal. They come in different shapes and forms. Some of them are tied in with the third party software, which you have to continually pay in order to keep your shopping cart, and those are great where Shopify and many, many different ones are available out there.

The second option will be to have a customized shopping cart that is yours to keep and you’ll never be tied in with the third party company. Today, I probably want to focus on functionality. Exactly what do you need to see in your shopping cart, so it works for you, your business, and the type of product and services you’re trying to sell online. For instance, are you going to be shipping items. That’s always a very big question. If you are shipping, there are many different options to choose from.

You could choose no shipping at all, so you don’t charge for shipping. They’re already calculated into the cost of selling the product. Another one could be a full UPS integration, so you want to integrate into one of the big delivery company in the US. A third option could be a flat rate shipping, where you decide per product perhaps, than this pair of shoes costs $3 to ship and this jacket cost maybe $5 to ship, and this is something you would be able to manage into your e-commerce website. Another mode of shipment truly could be… And we’ve done that for a company that sells plants in California and they sell plants all over the country, and what they’ve decided is they associated a number of points based on the plants size.

This plant costs four points and in the FedEx package when it is medium size, they know they can put 12 points worth of plants. So whenever someone adds different plants into their shopping carts and knows, “Oh, there’s those two plants and that small one. Look at that, it’s 12 points total, therefore it should select the medium size package, which has a cost associated with that.” So again, there are many different shipping options and those are sometimes things people don’t think too hard about it, but they are very important to the success of your website. Because if you cannot handle the shipping properly, if shipping starts costing you money, this is not going to work for you. You want to make sure you don’t charge too much or too little for the shipment of your products.

Another thing to consider is do you need inventory? Do you need the ability for the shopping cart to know how many t-shirts are left on your shelf? This will be a full integration to your inventory system inside your business. And oftentimes, this applies to retail shops. A big clothing store, for instance, will have its own POS, a point-of-sale system which holds the inventory. Any given day, the owner can go in his POS and see how many t-shirts are left on the shelf. Okay, we have two dozen of the medium size. Now, the website needs to know that information, because the last thing you want to do is sell products that are no longer available for sale or not have products that are available for sales and they don’t appear on your website. That is called a third party integration and it typically requires a very high level of programming. So most website designers you meet at networking functions will not be able to do that. You do need a PHP programmer or ASP programmer.

Now, it also depends on the point-of-sale system you are using in your store; not all of them allow for integration. Lightspeed, for instance, is a very good system and they allow for integration to their own shopping cart, but also integration to shopping carts like Magento, very strong cart. The nice thing with that is whenever you sell a pair of shoes in the store, the website knows that shoes is being decreased from your inventory level. So again, think of the shipping, think if you need inventory. Do you need reporting capabilities? Do you want to be able to pull up data as either in an Excel format or online based format? Do you need to know how much you sold, how many people used promo codes, and where did those people come from? Were they buying all from Florida or were they coming from Texas? Were they overseas buyers? So again, is it reporting important to you at that level?

If you are deciding to choose a shopping cart program that is already pre-made, it’s great and it may work fine for you. If they don’t have reporting capability, and this is something you want to add in three months or six months, well, your only choice you’re going to have in that period of time would be to actually delete everything you’ve done and just switch to another company. Make sure you ask those questions right at the beginning of developing a shopping cart. You have to come with a mind set that your shopping cart is going to be highly successful. Again, you don’t want to be tied in with a third party company that offers a very small shopping cart with very limited functionality, because most likely you’re going to outgrow that functionality and every money you invested in developing that cart is going to be wasted because you’re going to have to start from scratch.

Now, that is not true if you’re doing a custom shopping cart with the web development company. Because the shopping cart is customized to you, it can continually be improved on and functions can be added fairly easily. Another thing you want to know is are you going to offer online coupons? Some people call it promo codes. Are you going to do email marketing campaign upon the launch saying, “Enter promo 2014 and get 20% off.” If you do plan to do that kind of marketing efforts, you do need the promo code capability on your shopping carts and again, not all of them have that function. So now this shopping cart you’re looking at has that function. It says you can do promo code, but what type of promo code? Are we talking percentage only? Are you able to do a dollar amount off? Are you able to do BOGO, ‘Buy one Get One Free’? Truly, what kind of promo code functionality does it have and what truly do you need? It’s more important what you need than what they have. What you need is going to stay there, but need doesn’t go away. You need to make sure the cart you select has what you need. So for promo codes and other questions to ask will be, “Can I set this promo codes ahead of time. Can I set that for the next 12 months. I don’t have to worry about it.” For instance, you might want to say, “I want a promo code between August 1st and August 16th of this year, and we are in March perhaps. You want to be able to set up in the future. It’s already working.

It means on August 1st the promo code will be activated and August 16th it’ll stop working. This is what you want to do. So you don’t have to worry about having to go there on August 16th at midnight and remove it from your database. You want this to be automated for you because you do not have a lot of time to manage that type of things. Now we’re talking about payments. Payments is a huge thing. There are many options out there. A popular one is PayPal. PayPal would… Has great product. It’s seen as more of a low end product. It has less customization capabilities and a lot of the mom-and-pop shops are using PayPal. It’s very easy. It might not be the most competitive grades for your business, so if you intend to transact a lot of sale on your website, you might want to consider a full merchant account. The one we like to recommend is FirstData and we are partners with them, and we’re actually one of their partners and they give our client the best rate.

You want to keep that percentage rate on each transaction as low as possible. Again, you want to think in the future. You don’t want to be tide in at a high percentage rate when you can have a better deal because all those dollars, they accumulate, especially on the big ticket items. So again, are you doing a full merchant account integration? Are you doing a PayPal option? Or do you want both on your shopping cart? This is a discussion you should have with your webmaster before you select the type of carts you’re going to add to your website. Another option you want to look for is the ability for you to cross sell between your different products. For instance, you are selling a desk and you’re thinking, “Well, all the people who’ve looked at that desk also liked that chair. So you’re trying to promote an upsell online. It’s very common, people will expect it, and it’s a great way to encourage people to buy more than just one item. So again can you cross sell?

Another function would be the ability to have featured item throughout your website. Perhaps there is a dozen products you’re really trying to push because they give you the greatest margin of profit. So those products, we don’t want them hidden somewhere deep into the cart. You want them perhaps on your slide show, on your homepage, on the right column of every page. Depending on what your situation is, we can guide you through deciding where those featured products are. But does your shopping cart gives you that ability to simply mark a product as a featured product? So don’t forget to ask for very pertinent question because they do matter to the success of your cart. There is a couple of more elements you have to think about. First and foremost, the product itself. How is it going to display? How nicely is it going to display the product? Are you going to be able to have a photo gallery for each product? And how many photos does this shopping cart you have selected is going to allow you to upload? Are you limited to one, 20, unlimited? Also what type of galleries do you have? Can you do a 3D, turn around photos? Can you put a video of a photo? Do you accept online reviews on every product with the rating system, zero to five stars?

All of those are important questions you want to remember. The last think you want to think about is how are you going to track your orders? Is it simple enough and you just want an email notifying that someone has made a purchase and then you handle the order manually or do you have an order tracking system inside your office? Then this shopping cart needs to integrate too, so you do not have to do any manual work. Think about those questions. There are hundreds of other questions you should be asking about shopping carts, but those were the most important ones. The shipping, the way the products display, the way you’re going to collect payments. Are you going to have promo code? Are you going to be able to do reporting?

Those are the basic questions you should be asking the person you’re meeting with about your shopping cart. E-commerce solutions are wonderful. They enable your company to be open 24×7, 365 days a year. It doesn’t get sick. It doesn’t require benefits. It works for you as your sales and marketing team while you’re sleeping. For small retail shops, it’s a great option to increase revenue. For larger company, it’s the only way for them to remain competitive in their industry. So don’t forget to think about selling online. This is the way of the future. This is where everybody is buying now and you want to be aware of your competition and perhaps beat your competition in that game by starting early enough. If you have any question, give us a call. Have yourselves a fabulous day.