It is very difficult to think about a e-commerce website that sells tangible products without a shopping cart.  If you don’t know what a shopping cart is, it is the interface that lets you add items to a data array when you are shopping online.  When you’re done with adding all the items it presents to you a tabular view of the total of the amount you have to pay along with the list of items you have decided to purchase along with their individual prizes.

There are many flavors of prebuilt shopping carts available on the Internet and many shopping carts are even free.  Most of the time when you get your website hosted on a third-party commercial server among many free scripts they also give you a free shopping cart script that you can install as and when you need it.  But free is after all free.

Similarly there are many expensive, commercial shopping carts available that you can purchase and install or lease for a year or more.  They are mostly like the proprietary software that you may have on your computer; you can use it and you can make use of the features it already has but you cannot customize it much and you cannot customize the features that come with the software. Prebuilt commercial shopping carts become operational very quickly even if you have to compromise on the customization aspect.  Just purchase or lease the script and start using it from the day one. (more…)

With nationwide online retail sales expected to reach above $100 billion this year – estimates range from $115 billion to $175 billion, excluding travel – it is very evident that there are lots of would-be customers visiting the Web sites of their choice with the intent to purchase items.

Not withstanding the gaudy projected totals, online retail sales only represent roughly 5 percent of the total U.S. retail marketplace. Still, Internet use in America and around the world continues to grow, with broadband access gaining in penetration to even rural, isolated areas. The more ‘net users, the greater the number of potential customers for online retailers (sometimes called e-tailers) to sell their wares to.

That’s a good thing; now for the bad news – approximately three-quarters of online customers abandon online shopping carts during the purchase process. The reasons that they do so include the desire to simply comparison shop, too-high shipping costs, technical difficulties experienced during the transaction and a lack of time to complete the purchase, among others.

 It is therefore vitally important that online retailers do all within their power to convince putative buyers to complete the sales transaction and purchase the product(s). Studies indicate that there is a lot of room for improvement in this area.

Technical problems, in particular, continue to dog smaller e-tailers who don’t have the wherewithal to offer advanced shopping carts, nor to have experienced computer programmers on hand to fix things if there are any breakdowns. As a result, many smaller online establishments struggle, both with attracting customers from larger Web sites and with fostering a level of trust with their visitors that credit information is safe.

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