SEO-Friendly

As an online business owner, SEO (search engine optimization) should be one of your top priorities.  While most site owners have a part in creating intriguing content, they often have less impact on the design and search engine indexing.  If this sounds like your situation, then choosing an SEO-friendly shopping cart is essential.  Signs of a good cart with these qualities is one that automatically produces keyword-rich URLs relative to your site or items.

Coupon Support

It doesn’t matter what you sell, it is almost guaranteed that your customers are looking for a deal.  The best way to attract this type of audience is with coupons.  Numerous reports show that customers are increasingly on the hunt for online coupons, so a shopping cart that supports coupon codes will likely do you some good.  Without this feature, you are doing nothing but limiting your potential.

Cross-Selling Functionality

Cross-selling is the concept of selling customers additional related products to increase your total per-checkout revenue.  A perfect example would be recommending accessories to go along with the PC hardware you sell.  The shopping cart you choose should offer cross-selling functionality as an either a semi or fully automated process.  The best e-commerce platforms have systems that associate products and dynamically place related items on the corresponding product and checkout pages.

Customer Reviews

Genuine customer reviews make a great way to encourage more sales.  These reviews are like having a peer recommend your store to potential customers.  Think of it as a way of allowing your customers to market for you.  A shopping cart equipped with this feature should either support a review system from within, or allow you to connect to a third-party tool such as PowerReviews or similar.

Sharing and Recommendations

Any potential customer visiting your website should have the ability to share product details via email or in other ways.  Let’s say a teen is interested in one of your products and wants to let their mom or dad know they really want this particular item as a birthday gift.  To make this a seamless process, your store should provide the teen with any easy way to send notification to their parents without having to cut and paste the details.  A good shopping cart application will include a sharing feature, typically as a part of wish list system that calls for the customer to complete some type of registration in order to use it.

Today’s e-commerce shopping carts are loaded with features and these are just a few of many that we believe are absolute deal breakers.  The good thing is that with hundreds of applications to choose from, you have the luxury to be very selective.

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