12 Tips Online Shopping Cart For New E-commerce Merchants(part 3)

9) Include Product Availability

If the product is not available for immediate shipping, let your online shopping cart customers know it. You may loose a customer if your product is not immediately available but the chances are you will have upset customers if the items are not shipped promptly. If there is a chance of having return customers or customer referals, this type of processing will lose them.

10) Avoid Under Selling

Many commercial online shopping carts include logical displays of similar products. If your e-commerce cart program does not include this option, consider looking for another. You want to take advantage of available screen space to offer customers items that they are most likely to purchase. There are a number of appropriate ways to do this the appearance of being helpful to the customer rather than being pushy.

11) Avoid Unecessary Required Clickthroughs or Over Selling on Check out

Though it is entirely appropriate to show additional items when the shopping cart totals are displayed and recommended to have clearly defined "continue shopping" options, it is annoying to have seperate pages devoted entirely toward similar items during check-out. Some carts force you through additional sales screens on the way to check-out.

Though the customer may have invested enough time to complete the checkout, they will be less likely to return. This is a common tactic used by services that have a low balled leader item who make their money off of additional services. Many domain registrars are doing this in order to sell inadequate or unnecessary additional features such as email or web hosting.

12) Secure Online Checkout - Including Personal Information

Most merchants are aware that payment information (eg. credit card processing) should always be done in a secured (https) environment. It is also highly recommended to have the personal information (name, address, phone, etc) be collected in a secure environment. If you have your own secure certificate there is no reason why this should not be done.

If you are considering a commercial shopping cart that doesn't secure this part of the check out, consider looking for a different cart. Many customers will go ahead with the order but there is no reason to lose customers that expect to see this security.