Scouting the essential e- commerce features
You as an online merchant are probably aware about the importance of the professional look of your e commerce site. However are you aware of the ‘must have‘ features to make your e commerce site a real success?
Yes you heard it right! To make your shopping cart to serve your online store better it is the time to know about the essential e- commerce features.
User friendly and search engine friendly: to soar high with your online store your shopping cart should be search engine friendly and provide you with the ultimate control over your meta tags, meta description, title tags and keywords so that you can optimize it for the search engines.
Your shopping cart should be designed in such a way so that you can automatically generate keyword-rich URLS, based on your product and category names in order to generate page code which is XHTML 1.0 strict compliant.
PCI Compliant Hosting & Security: Think of this, your website needs to accept online payments so you must select a provider who can host your website in a PCI compliant environment. Although there is a lot indeed to understand about PCI compliance however, hosting your site in a PCI compliant environment should be your first step.
Up-selling & Cross-selling: To offer your client the utmost experience in shopping your site should involve the up selling and cross selling features. Up selling is offering the customer a product which is of a greater value and cross selling refers to selling items which are complimentary to the clients are buying.
Product Review: This is indeed one of the most powerful product management tools. Research has proved that even a bad review can help in selling product than ‘no review’. Your e commerce site should also enable customers to post reviews of the products. The browser then can easily browse through the review prior selecting.
Pricing Management: The pricing management in your e commerce site should be flexible. Your e commerce site should also accommodate things like promotional pricing for any product, customer, order retail pricing etc for a smart shopping experience.
Catalog Management: Catalog is indeed the USP of your e commerce cart. Identify a particular solution to get your online store started quickly by offering a huge import / export of your catalog. Make sure that this solution offers product cloning, simplify catalog additions, automatic resizing of your product images and also some strong inventory management capabilities.
Integrated Shipping: Beef up your shopping cart a you integrate the major shipping cart solution like FEDEX, UPS, USPS etc. this further enhances the authenticity of the site while making the site further user friendly.
Apart from these you can also offer your online store little extra with the features like Product Feed Support and with the gift or wishlist features. An informed decision can actually help in striking the difference between a successful online shopping portal and the shopping cart which fails within the first year. Evaluate therefore prior investing !
Good Luck!
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