Shopping Carts and Baskets

Pre-built shopping cart software delivers a great deal of functionality "out of the box" and in many cases makes the best starting point for your eCommerce operations.

However, in our experience it is rare to find a shopping cart that meets all your requirements immediately.

We help you choose the right shopping cart software

There is a very wide range of pre-built shopping cart tools available.  Most share a range of common features, including product catalogues, some form of stock control, shopping baskets and some support for order processing in the back-office.

However there are many points where shopping carts differ and this means you need to make some informed decisions when making a decision about implementing a shopping cart - for example:

• Does the shopping cart meet your business process requirements?
• Can the shopping cart be integrated with any existing order processing software or other systems (e.g. accounting, stock control, CRM)
• Does the shopping cart support the transaction types you need to be able to process?
• Will the shopping cart handle your product photography requirements (e.g. zoom, different angles, product video)
• Can the shopping cart be customised to add the features that aren't available by default?

We can help you consider your requirements and identify the pre-built shopping cart platforms that will help you most - as well as doing the detailed analysis work for any shopping cart customisations that may be required.

We configure your shopping cart software

Shopping Cart configuration is not for the faint of heart - these are complex software tools which need to be configured with care.  Particularly when setting up payment methods, security options, and integrating with third-party software, it's important to make sure that the integrations are configured and working correctly.

There will also be a lot of configuration required to make sure that the shopping cart supports your business processes properly, for example:

• Setting options for stock control
• Pricing and discounting options
• Shipping charges configuration
• Address verification options
• Search and "related product" settings and presentation
• Reporting and payment reconciliation

And of course it's very important to make sure that your analytics are configured correctly to ensure you can measure performance properly when a transaction completes successfully.

We tackle these issues with a business-led approach during the planning phase of our projects, to make sure that we can configure your shopping cart to work as you would expect it to.

We skin your shopping cart software

Skinning refers to the process of applying your corporate identity to your shopping cart.  We can provide appropriate layouts or we can work with your preferred designers to create the page layouts.

It's important to remember that the page layout (particuarly for shopping carts) needs to be flexible to accomodate both future development in your business and minor adjustments to layout during any subsequent conversion rate optimisation projects.

Working with your existing shopping cart solution

In many cases we can work with your existing shopping cart systems to extend and upgrade them to take advantage of the latest version of the software, or to add custom functionality.

However, eCommerce standards and best practice move constantly, and we do sometimes find that unless there are compelling reasons to re-use an existing platform, the benefits of moving to a up-to-date ecommerce platform very often outweigh the costs.

Can we help you with your shopping cart implementation?

Our experience comes from years of business process analysis as well as knowledge of popular shopping cart solutions and a range of shopping cart implementation projects for businesses large and small.