If you are a business owner that wants to expand your business online, there are a lot of website hosting partners that have shopping carts included or for sale that want to compete for your business.
One of the best ways to put together a list of requirements when you are determining which vendor that you want to choose is to look at the merchandising features that the shopping cart offers. Merchandising tools may not be first on the list of some developers, but they make a huge difference from an operational standpoint when it comes to saving dollars.
Here are some merchandising features that should likely be on your list of capabilities that you want included in your online store:
Table of Contents
Rights management:
If you have several employees and vendors that need to access your store, one of the most disappointing things that you can encounter is a shopping cart that limits how much freedom you can give these people when they are editing your ecommerce site. A writer who creates descriptions of your products will have different needs from a vendor who is checking how their sales and inventory is going through your site.
One thing that you can do that can help people have segregated responsibilities is to work with an experienced vendor like 1shoppingcart.com. They have rights management with the degree of granularity that allows the manager to assign people with different roles precisely the rights that they need. If you are comparing sites and are at the test phase, change some rights in the backend in each shopping cart. What you will probably find is that when you change rights in other shopping carts, you lose some functionality that isn’t listed as being the functionality that you should lose. That is because most shopping carts contain so many features that it may take a few versions to get everything right. The shopping cart at 1shoppingcart.com allows you to change the rights you think that you are changing without losing other rights.
Complementary items:
Although there are a few vendors that can provide you with a list of goods that you can sell at your store and drop-ship to the client, having a a complementary items database integrated into your online store before you even get started means that you can pick and choose categories of products to fill the ‘related items’ list from the day that you get started.
In addition to immediate access, you should also look for a vendor that will ship anywhere in the world and also carries products from most regions in the world. That way, your global catalog will be more robust.
Reports:
Solid reporting that is timely is one of the best ways for management to be able to analyze the progress of your store in a way that will lead to success. The capability of logging on and seeing instant results is therefore helpful. What is even better is the option to have digests and alerts sent to your smartphone or tablet so that you can react swiftly when inventory is low or you need to fill an order.
Leveraging merchandising options isn’t always the most apparent way to go out and select a shopping cart. Nonetheless, if you want to save time and money, and also leave a good impression on the people that use your site, it is a good idea to incorporate the best practices that you find in merchandising as you compare different vendors.
