The Right Shopping Cart Can Keep Your Business Rolling

Is your online business stalling because you are drowning in administrative details? Many businesses are one step away from phenomenal success, if only they could increase their productivity and reduce repetitive tasks and paperwork.

After all, any time spent dealing with writing down orders or sending out e-mails one-by-one is time that you can’t spend selling to your prospects. This is why implementing a full-featured shopping cart is a must in today’s online business world.

Here’s six things to consider when you choose an online shopping cart:

1. Make sure your online shopping cart has an easy-to-follow ordering system.

2. A good shopping cart will automate such functions as sending receipts to both your client and your business, so you have a record of the order.

3. Personalized messages to new client can also be automated via the shopping cart. Thanks to the wonders of mail merge, each message can print the person’s first name. If you want to get fancy, you can even automate other variables such as city, state and product purchased. It’s a great time saver and people will think your messages are truly personal.

4. Sales reports can be created by a good cart for any variable you can think of, such as total sales, daily sales, weekly sales, sales in a given period, as well as sales by product.

5. A good shopping cart does not just take orders. It can manage and send other client communications, such as newsletters or special event invitations. This allows you to work off of one database and not have to update other databases hosted by a separate company that sends out your newsletters or autoresponders. Why duplicate efforts?

6. Make sure your shopping cart offers clients control of some aspect of their accounts, such as unsubscribing to newsletters.

Dan Janal is the founder of PRLeads.com, as well as several Internet-based businesses.