E-Commerce Blog

The tenet of customer service in the online shopping process is simple: the more you engage potential customers, and provide links relevant to their needs, the more they?ll buy and the longer they?ll remain a customer. As it turns out, the solution to that challenge may be as simple as using shopping cart functionality to its fullest.

Later shopping made easy?User-initiated actions like printing out the items in the cart or emailing a copy of the cart to a friend should be as simple as one click. Some carts offer ?Save for Later? functionality, as well. ?Giving them [these options] creates a bond between your customer and your site,? says MarketLive?s ?The Perfect Shopping Cart? report. ?They?ve left something behind, something they put time into, and they can return whenever they like.? Merchants in The E-Tailing Group?s 7th Annual Merchant Survey Report reported cart-integrated ?email a friend? tools are in the top-half of their cart add-ons with…

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Shopping Cart Functionality Can Increase Sales

By day Sean Dupuis is a courier for FedEx. By night, he sends out packages of his own: boxes of boots and moccasins and sheepskin bags for his bustling website business called Sheepskin and Things. Stretched thin, he?s able to get it all done because his shopping cart and its third-party integrations do much of the work for him.

?You get home, you check your email, it tells you if there?s a new order, you log into your control panel, you print out the completed invoice and completed airway bill for UPS, you pull the inventory and apply the invoice and airway bill to the package, and out the door it goes,? says Dupuis, age 36.

In the process he?s using seamless 256-bit encryption from Starfield Technologies and shipping from UPS. He?s using payment transfers from PayPal and credit card processing through an international gateway. He?s using sales leads from Google Product Search and web analytics from Traffic Facts. And he?s doing his search-engine submissions…

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Third-Party Integrations Make Shopping Carts ?Easier To Use?

When searching for ?educational toys? on Google, at No. 5 on the list you?ll find BrainwavesToys.com?up from No. 78 a year ago. Michael Stebbins, co-founder of the business, employed a series of search engine optimization (SEO) strategies within his cart to achieve this result.

?A lot of people have these ideas that they?re optimizing for an entire site, and oftentimes it?s not about that,? says Stebbins. ?It?s really about the fact that any page that you want the search engines to list, including cart pages, must expose the relevant content in a way that the search engines will understand.?

Brainwaves Educational Toys was conceived as a case study for Market Motive, where Stebbins is also CEO. Market Motive is an online subscription service providing search engine SEO and web analytics consulting.

The reasons for services like his are simple. Search engines are the ?most valued source of information? for shopping research, according to a survey…

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Shopping Carts And Search Engines

Roy Rubin held the cyber equivalent of a barn raising and had several thousand of his closest friends over for the event. Of course, everyone actually stayed home and did the work from their own little cubicles, kitchen tables, laptops on airplanes and Blackberrys on bar tops. That?s how it goes when you launch a project like developing an open source shopping cart, which is what Rubin and his team at Varien did over the past couple of years. The result is Magento, a shopping the source code of which is yours, free for the download, and which is now loaded on servers around the globe in about 45 languages.

Rubin and his team at Varien, a Southern California web and software development company, were absolutely sure that the marketplace needed a shopping cart that had a great foundation ? platform ? in the kinds of things that ecommerce merchants thought were important.

Rubin: We had been involved in the ecommerce industry for sometime and had experienced and seen many of…

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Magento Shopping Cart And 20,000 Friends

Virtually every ecommerce merchant processes credit card payments. We asked Michael Shatz, publisher of The Merchant?s Guide, a resource to help merchants understand credit card processing issues (at Themerchantsguide.com), to share his views on choices merchants must face when deciding how best to deal with online payments. Shatz is a veteran of the credit card and ecommerce industries.

PeC: What should ecommerce merchants look for when they choose a credit card processor? 


Shatz: Integrity. Processors should be straightforward in the way they market to, price, service and report to the merchant. If possible, one should choose a registered payment processor that has direct connections to the ?associations,? which is an industry term for Visa, MasterCard, AmericanExpress and Discover. Examples of these types of companies are Litle & Co. (Litle.com), Chase Paymentech Solutions (Paymentech.com) and First Data (Firstdata.com). Online reporting is a must-have, and this…

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Quick Query: Credit Card Expert Stresses Integrity