Shopping
Cart Software
If you want
to run an online shop, then you will need a mechanism to display products,
calculate prices, taxes and delivery charges, and an order mechanism
to allow the customer to buy. In addition you will need the adminstration
access to input information about the products, and receive information
about orders and customers.
These are key considerations:
1) keep the cost
down: you dont need bespoke software, get a robust solution "off
the shelf" that you can use to get going. These can produce perfectly
acceptable results.
2)some shop software
(aimed at the larger stores) only generate pages dynamically for each
product, as a customer picks it from a menu. If you want to be able
to have search engines identify your individual products, then you want
shop software that can run with static pages for each product or group
of products. This is more time consuming to set up and maintain, but
it might allow customers to find your product as they search for "widget
xyz123."
3) dont get too
ambitious, there is no end to clever inventory management systems, forecasting
etc that could be in the software. But you might be will advised to
start off with a basic system, and figure out what people buy, how they
behave etc and be prepared to modify your shop or products with experience.
Keep it simple.
4)ensure that the
software can run on the hosting system you are using, and be clear about
any long term licencing costs.
We recommend you
look at Activeshop, or
better still: Actinic. These
can integrate with the popular
secure payment systems. If you want a very simple solution which
is already integrated with a payment system look at: Clickandbuild.
We can integrate
these shop systems in your website, if you require further information,
we would be pleased to discuss your requirements. Please contact us
.
