Features of Effective Shopping Cart Platforms

A shopping cart for e-commerce websites is the functionality of a website where purchase activity and shopping transactions are processed. It can also refer to the content management system (CMS) that a site uses to catalog products, track sales, and provide content for web pages.

An e-commerce CMS is a vital part of any e-commerce business, but the best e-commerce CMS platforms need to have certain ‘must have’ features in order to be most effective.

Here are some of the vital features that an e-commerce CMS should have to be the most effective solution for your business as well as the customers it maintains:

Make It SEO Friendly
There are many creative things you can do as a site owner to optimize your site for search engines. Having a CMS that is SEO friendly is very important. You can generally tell how effective and friendly a CMS is by looking at the way URL’s are written. Any SEO friendly CMS should include an URL writing and editing feature as well as meta tag editing capabilities that allow for editing of the meta title, meta description and meta keywords tag for each page.

Make It Sell Across the Board
The term ‘cross-selling’ is what happens when a customer makes a purchase and is encouraged to purchase additional related products, increasing the revenue ‘upsell’ opportunity for each checkout. The ideal shopping cart CMS should automate cross-selling capabilities with your other similar products associated with the original purchase. Cross selling is an essential and very effective tool for increasing revenue. If a CMS does not have that capability, keep looking.

Make It Coupon-Friendly
Especially now in a time of economic turmoil, people love a deal. The prospect of saving money by using coupons can go a long way to help drive even more traffic and effectively increase sales. Your shopping cart should support coupon code capability and provide a flexible pricing mechanism to change discounts and promotional pricing on-the-fly as well.

Make It Easy to Monitor
If your business is utilizing pay-per-click advertising to drive traffic, you want a shopping cart that allows you to easily scrutinize how effective your ads are at driving traffic and how well your landing pages are at converting visitors into buyers, to ensure a return on your ad spending investment. Having a shopping cart that can handle the management and optimization of your PPC campaigns and associated landing pages is very important.

Make The Most of Imagery
Think about the last time you shopped for a product online but couldn’t see a picture. How likely were you to buy? Consumers want to see quality images associated with the products their looking to purchase. Having a shopping cart platform that allows visitors to zoom and look at different angles of the product can certainly help as well. Your shopping cart should allow you to manipulate your images as well as properly attribute them with ALT tags.

Make It Customer Friendly
Customer feedback is critical. Providing your customers with a tool to communicate with you and provide immediate feedback on their experience has become a common expectation for online shoppers. Your shopping cart should have the ability to let your customers leave product reviews or comments. Some carts will not have this capability directly, but will allow you to integrate with a third party resource that can. You also need to give customers the ability to share information about your products with other customers, such as a wish list feature, allowing customers to easily share information without having to clumsily cut or paste.

Make It RSS Capable
RSS is a data format that allows the information on your web pages to be easily broadcast or syndicated to a highly targeted audience. RSS is an extremely effective marketing tool that allows you to send news about your products, information about upcoming deals, as well as coupon promotions, and discounts to your target audience. If your shopping cart platform does not generate RSS feeds for your products and sales, look for another cart that does.

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Tagged as: CMS, content managment system, search engine optimization, shopping cart