Payments, Part II: The Cart Strikes Back

September 11th, 2008 Chris Posted in Payments | 1 Comment »

First of all, don’t even think about asking me to explain the post title. I’ve got no idea – just kind of reminded me of Star Wars.

Last post, I gave an intro to all the working parts of online credit card processing. Sounds complicated? It is and the good news is that today, I’ll cover the easy part: the storefront and the shopping cart.

Storefront

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m pretty anal about how we present ourselves to our customers so our #1 requirement here was to be able to look very professional and do service to the different products and services we offer.

Because we don’t offer that many things to purchase (less than 20), the easiest thing for us was to design the storefront ourselves. That is, to create the web content for each of the products along with the necessary descriptions.

Where this won’t work is if you have a large number of products where it just would be too labour intensive to code up content for each page. Think amazon.com and all those books – their web pages are all database driven. That have entered raw product info and when you search for a particular book, it grabs that data and generates the web page on the fly.

You can purchase storefront software solutions. When I say software, I mean both that some can be hosted somewhere else where you load your product data up and it is presented to your customer on their site, while some you install on your own web server and load up the product data locally.

My advice here is that if you don’t have a huge stable of products, go with your own storefront and don’t buy a product. It’s much easier to integrate into the look and feel of your brand and you’ll save money…

If you’re interested, you can see what our store looks like – and please feel free to buy something while you are there…

Shopping Cart

Once someone is interested in a product in your storefront, they click “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now” or whatever button you’ve implemented. That button contains a link to the shopping card which indicates which product is being added. This sends the product to the shopping cart where is held until the user checks-out (i.e. pays) or leaves. Here is an example screen grab from ours:

Forget doing this puppy by yourself – too complicated… You need to go out and get one (and there are many, many different carts). Just try googling shopping cart and stand back.

One that I can recommend (because we used to use it) is 1ShoppingCart (www.1shoppingcart.com). It is pretty reasonably priced ($35 to $100 a month) and had all the features we were looking for. The only reason we still don’t use it is that we went with a single solution that does other things our business also needed.

What features you ask. Well, we learned from experience what we wanted in a shopping cart. A well equiped shopping cart can be a sales engine itself. Above and beyond simply gathering selected products, showing the price and then taking payment information, we wanted to be able to do things like:

• Support both one-time purchases as well as subscriptions (example, $20 per month). The latter can be complicated as the software needs to remember to charge the user’s credit card each time.
• Calculate shipping and taxes on the order. Regardless of where you are, someone government probably wants a slice of your sales. We just wimp-out ourselves and say that all tax is included, then back it out when we do the books.
• Coupons, Discount or Promotional offers. If you want to promote a product, you can provide certain users with a code they can enter to get that discount. Very important to have…
• Upsell. The ability, based on what products are in the cart, to recommend other products at the time of check-out.
• Email receipts and invoices. Be able to automatically generate and email out the necessary invoices and receipts for customers so you don’t have to worry about it.
• Email auto-responders. Once someone has bought something, triggering a follow-up set of emails can be very powerful. You can get feedback on the product and/or offer them another upsell.
• Customization. The ability to customize the look and feel so that even if the user has gone to a different site that hosts your shopping cart, they’ll have the same experience. In short, you want your shopping cart page to look like your web page – even if they’re hosted in different places.

As I said, there are many products out there. If you’re looking for both a storefront as well as a shopping cart, the good news is that most storefront solutions include a shopping cart so you won’t have to implement two different things.

There are some other considerations which you must look at before finalizing your decision on a shopping cart. It must be compatible with the rest of the payment processing chain. More on that next time…

What’s Next

Next time we’ll talk about the even more confusing world of payment gateways and merchant accounts. Now it gets interesting. OK, I realize that this stuff may be considered quite far from interesting but if you’ve got to do it, hopefully this helps…

C.