10 Reasons Why Our Shopping Cart is the Best!

Until now, e-commerce site owners had to choose between the lesser of two evils when it came to shopping cart technology.

Static shopping carts were the first ones on the market and were very difficult to use. You couldn’t manage your cart very easily so you have to call up your hosting company whenever you want to make any little change to your site - pricing, products, descriptions, etc. These got the job done for very simple sites, but this first-generation technology was primitive and not user friendly by today’s standards.

Dynamic shopping carts came to the rescue! Now, the site owner had real-time access to the site 24/7. Site owners could jump online and make all kinds of changes to their site. The more advanced ones (like ours) allowed the site owner to even change page orders, quickly add specials, alter payment acceptance terms, and a myriad number of other details, all with a few mouse clicks. It was all so easy and effective.

That’s programming - but what about search engines? The big problem with dynamic carts (and a dirty little secret) is that they don’t talk nicely with search engines. The massive search engines, which were designed to efficiently catalog the content of millions of static web pages, simply can’t handle the programming techniques used in dynamic shopping carts.

So, most people who sell dynamic carts nowadays try to wow you with the cool features, but don’t talk too much about how dynamic sites actually perform worse than a static site when it comes to search engines, which results in lower traffic, and hence lower income, for you, the site owner.

We are the first ones to tackle this problem head on. We have created an application that has all the advanced features of dynamic carts, but is programmed in a way that makes search engines able to read the pages. That means when you buy our cart, you have the best of both worlds - high traffic from search engines and advanced dynamic shopping cart features.

We encourage you to contact our sales department at 877.633.9536 x2 for more information on how we have done this.

Conventional industry wisdom holds that there are two ways to integrate e-commerce into your business. Choice #1 is to find a supplier who will build you a custom program to exactly match your needs. As you may have guessed, the catch here is the price - custom work is always expensive to produce and support. Choice #2 is to buy from a cheap supplier - they save you some money, but you’ll need to rearrange your business to match their software.

Wow, what a great choice for the business owner! You can either pay too much or get a product that doesn’t meet your needs - and some vendors even give you both!

We find this whole state of affairs to be sad. Fortunately, when you have a large number of shopping cart customers like we do, this whole tradeoff of customization vs. expense goes out the window.

Why is that? It’s because we view every business as unique. What you need is not the same as another site owner needs. We knew that to offer an outstanding service, we had to create a shopping cart application that could be easily and inexpensively modified to add features unique to each business owner.

The good news is that when you order a feature from us that does not come with our base cart, the odds are pretty good that we’ve done something similar, if not identical, in the past for another customer. We intelligently code our programs so that we can take the programming we’ve done on previous projects and reuse it on other projects with only slight modification.

For our customers, that means that in addition to the rich feature set that comes with our base product, we can quickly and inexpensively add any feature you want with your cart. So you get the best of both worlds -a great product just like custom developers give you, but at pricing more typical of the low-cost vendors.

To find out just how fast and inexpensive it is to build a cart that matches exactly what you need, contact us today at 877.633.9536 x2.

Our customer service is what has made us what we are and separates us from the rest of the industry. Our customer service focus is derived from our business model. We know that for our company to succeed, we need a lot of clients with doing well for and staying with us for a very long time.

To make you successful, we need to provide you access to the best people in the industry. We take recruiting at our company seriously and hire for our team only the most technically qualified, friendly, and enthusiastic individuals we can find.

That means you get fast, courteous customer support every time you call. You don’t get put on hold; you don’t get a recording; you don’t wait for hours for someone to call you back only to return your tech support call hours later when it is too late. You will have a dedicated account representative who will know you and your business on a first-name basis.

In addition to being friendly and technically savvy, our staff members have seen a lot of e-commerce sites succeed (and yes, have seen some fail too!) They can give you strong business advice and tell you how to build and promote your site so it does as well as it can.

Look at our list of base features for our shopping cart and compare it to any competitor offering a similar product. You’ll see that what we provide is the most complete package to get started in the e-commerce world.

OK, well not everything - you need to provide the product after all! But everything else, we’ll take care of…

Our software package is so easy to use that you’ll be up and running and comfortable with your cart within days. We’ll train you on how to use the convenient product management and order tracking systems
We’ll set you up with a merchant account and secure payment gateway so you can collect credit card payments securely over the Internet.
Our site reporting features show you how much traffic you are getting and how much of that traffic is being converted into sales on a product by product basis.

· Our great customer service staff is available to help you with any question you have.

Many shopping carts that claim to be user friendly are really designed by techies, for techies. We don’t think you should have to have a computer science degree from MIT to operate your cart, so we designed our program with the average business user in mind. In fact, even many of our customers who are self-confessed “techno-phoebes” are able to use our cart once we walk them through it a few times!

We designed everything with an easy to use, friendly graphical interface. Quite frankly, if you can use Microsoft Word, you can use our shopping cart - it’s about that simple.

Call us today at 877.633.9536 x2 - we’ll give you a free online demo of the cart over the phone and you can see just how easy it is to use!

Item 7: Automated shipping, taxes, replacement parts, email follow-up, discounts, search, sizes and colors.

A lot of carts out there handle basic shopping cart features but can’t handle a variety of things that businesses really need. Using one of them can make you compare pretty unfavorably to your competitors sites. To give just a few examples….

Depending on your local laws, you may need to charge sales tax - and maybe only if you are shipping to certain states, and maybe only for some of your products. Our e-commerce program can handle that logic.
Let’s say you have a complex product like a piece of machinery and you need to sell replacement parts for it. Our cart allows you to easily associate replacement parts with the original products.
What do you do if you sell to both end-users and to wholesalers. You need to make sure that your wholesalers get a discount price, but you don’t want to make your regular customers aware of wholesale prices.
Our cart allows you to discreetly segregate wholesalers and end users.
Our shopping cart allows you to automatically send follow-up e-mails to customers after they place an order and after products have been shipped.
You can easily put products “on sales” and show both the regular and special price.

If you get our live chat feature with your cart, you’ll be able to provide real-time, online customer support to your customers whenever you or anyone else at your company is at a computer.

What a great feature! Imagine this…a potential customer is at your site, looking around, maybe they have a question about your product or they are confused about something. Usually at this stage they will leave your site in frustration. But wait - just as they are about to leave, they see that Live Help button on your site. Your computer makes a noise so you know you’ve got someone who wants to chat, you answer their questions, they place a big order, everyone is happy.

Being able to answer questions about your product increases customer comfort. They want to feel they are doing business with a professional company that is available for them. Also, you get great feedback and get to learn about what types of questions your customers have as they are browsing your site, which helps you determine if more information needs to be added to make your site clearer.

We recommend the live chat feature for all of our customers. Contact us at 877.633.9536 x2 for more information on this feature.

“The Internet is all about information!!” Now how many times have you heard that one? Lots of people in our industry like to profess platitudes like this but their products don’t support their enthusiastic statements.

Information needs to flow in both directions. Of course your customers need to know what you are selling, and most carts provide that. But for you to make the right business decisions, you need information on your customers - how do they get to your site, and what do they do once they get there.

Our statistics packages report a wealth of information to you to help you manage your cart. These programs run on the Internet and are updated automatically; they are available for you any time you want to look at them. You can find out things like…..

· Are you’re marketing efforts getting results? Is traffic to your site growing, falling, or remaining stable?
· Is your marketing targeted effectively? What search engines are your site visitors coming from, and what keywords they are typing in to find you?
· How long are people staying on your site, and how many pages do they view?
· Are my prices for certain products too high or too low? What percentage of people who go to my site and look at product and wind up placing an order? How does that compare to the statistics for products B, C, etc.?
· Who were my best customers over a certain time period?

Our cart gives you this all of this information and a lot more. Just like a physical, bricks and mortar retailer needs this information to make informed decisions, you will need it to give your cart the best chance to succeed.

The reports come out in an informative, easy to read format. But there’s a lot of information contained in them. Don’t be shy to call us up if you have any questions about how to interpret them!

OK, you’ve got an online flower shop and you’re gearing up for Valentine’s Day. You want to tell all your previous customers about the great selection of flowers available and give them some advice on appropriate choices. You also want to send your best customers a little something extra - you’re going to give them a little promotional code to give them a 10% discount on any orders they place.

A lot of work, right? Not with our bulk e-mailer. This program allows you to send messages to all your customers, or to just a selection. Just type in your message, press send, and off it goes. No need to search through records and painstakingly compile an e-mail list - all the addresses is automatically saved from when the customer placed an order. And each customer’s e-mail is personalized - they receive an individual e-mail with no other recipients on it.

It’s very important to be able to communicate with customers on a regular basis - your sales will be much higher if you take the opportunity to announce new products, spread the word about special promotions, and keep your customers informed with an informal newsletter. Our bulk e-mailer is so easy to use that if you want to do this often (and you should), it won’t take you very much time at all.