If you ever wanted to have your own online store, the biggest problem might be your shopping cart software. Why ? Simple, because it connects your customers and you as the owner of the store. You really have to convince customers about :
- Easy to use shopping interface.
You may have the best products with the best competitive price. But if your customers find difficulties when they browse your shop, they can move to other stores with that simple reason.
Look at the screenshot above, an efficient shopping cart interface with good features :
Category Menu.
Helps your customers to find the right category of what they want to buy. Additional "New Items", "Hot Sale", "Featured / Recommended Products" menus can be shown here to give suggestions to your customers.
This is for customers who don't know manufacturers, brand names, models, or version of the product they're looking for. Basically, customers can enter anything here and matching products will be shown. If they think that the standard search box is not enough, they can use "Advanced Search" instead.- Products should be well presented. But it doesn't have to mention all features. Only important features are shown here. The complete information can be obtained by clicking on it.
On the bottom customers can edit the quantity of individual product. Then after clicking that little cart symbol, the order will be shown at shopping cart list.
- Safety
Customers will love buying something on your shop if you are really can be trusted. It takes time to make customers believe, but these things will help you to make it faster :
SSL Certificate. You must obtain it from trusted authority. Technically, it is a protocol that provide secure communications between your customers (clients or end users) and your web server. Clients don't have to be authenticated, but your server must be clearly authenticated so customers can be sure that it is safe to execute transactions with you.- Hacker Free Seal Sign. An excellent reminder to your customers that you are taking information security seriously. But this not an urgent thing to have. Usually, an SSL Certificate is enough.
- Privacy
You must tell customers how you will use their submitted data. You should make a clear statement about it and you must obey it. - Payment Options
Consider to implement some payment gateways because your customers can be from any country with any background. Ashop Commerce supports 65+ trusted payment gateways, I'm sure they are sufficient to handle all online orders from around the world.
