How to set up an effective shopping cart
Online commerce is a bit involved. There are several steps you must take to set up an effective shopping cart.
Below are the major components of getting a shopping cart for your website. With solutions in place, we will help you every step of the way to achieve your goals.
1) Identify your products
Determine what you are going to sell online. The more products you have, the more your shopping cart will cost. You may only have one item, you may want to sell hundreds of items, or you may only wish to place your best selling items online. If you are not technical, we can assist you with the complete setup.
2) Organize your products
If applicable, you need to group your products into logical categories so customers can easily find what they are looking for. For example, if you were selling t-shirts you may wish to list your categories: men, women, children and so on.
3) Get pictures of your products
Customers like to see pictures of the items they are purchasing. The most effective way to share your products with clients is through pictures. You need to provide us with a digital image (preferably jpg or gif) of each product. Good quality pictures will look professional and customers will want to buy from you. In some cases we can take pictures of your products (if you're local) or you can have digital photos taken by a commercial photographer. You may already have prints of your products which need to be scanned. There is an additional charge to scan the photos you wish to include in your cart. Let us know if you need this additional service when you consult with us.
4) List your products
We will need an electronic list of your products. An Excel Spreadsheet is the easiest and most effective way to provide us with a list of your products. The more you help with this list, the quicker your cart can be up and running. You will want to include the: price, weight, title, category, options, etc.
5) Decide on shipping
Decide which shipping method to use. If you do not have a preference, we recommend United States Postal Service (USPS) and our shopping cart provides an automatic price calculation based on weight. When a product is ordered, your webpage will connect with the USPS tools webpage to find out how much it will cost to ship a product from your location to the location of your customer.
Registration is required for one of the following services:
USPS web tools: Register for USPS Web Tools
FedEx: Register for an account
UPS: http://www.ups.com
6) Sign up for Paypal
Paypal is probably the least expensive and is the easiest way to accept payments online, especially if you are a startup company. Decide how you will accept payment.
Get additional information at PayPal.com.
PayPal: Sign up for Paypal Account
7) Accept credit cards online
You will need to decide how you wish to accept payment from customers. Here is a list of payment providers currently supported with our software.
Shopping cart software integrated with:
• Google Checkout
• Authorize.net
•· PayPal / PayPal Pro
• 2Checkout
• Linkpoint
• WorldPay
• Barclays ePDQ
• NOCHEX / Protx / SECpay
• More payment providers...
• Offline CC processing
8) Domain registration and hosting:
You will need a domain registered and a hosting plan with database support. We only work with PHP versions for mySQL. The software is integrated with the major payment processing companies such as PayPal, Google Checkout, authorize.net and many more.
We recommend ix web hosting for compatibility. They are reliable and affordable. Please visit them for hosting plans and fees.
The text content for the pages should be provided in separate word document with photos for graphic editing per page and each web page must be a maximum of or equivalent to, a letter size page (8.5" x 11") when printed.