The benefits of using a Shopping Cart on your website

Tue, 23rd February, 2010 - Posted by Tamara Baranova

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If you decided to start selling informaiton products from your website you need to decide on how you are going to automate the delivery of purchases to your customers. Information products offer a good way of converting your knowledge and expertise into products that can be sold online and offline regardless of the amount of hours you work every day. If you are trying to implement the 4-hours-working-week concept – you know that’s something that you need to do as soon as possible. You can then use social media marketing to promote your products.

One option would be to integrate PayPal into your HTML/CSS website. It’s easy and cheap to do. Your payments will be securely processed by PayPal so you don’t need to worry about handling someone else’s card details. However the downside is that every time someone places an order for an ebook or a mp3 recording – you have to go online and send the customer the file or a link to download it. This will take time. And by no means the income, generated from such sales, can be called “passive”.

The other option is to use a shopping cart. Whichever system you are using at the moment to manage your website – WordPress, Joomla, HTML – there is a way to integrate a shopping cart solution. Some are free (like ZenCart), for some you need to pay a regular monthly free (like 1shoppingcart). However the system will handle the whole purchasing process on your behalf – from listing the products to sending a Thank You message.

The main benefits of a shopping cart over basic PayPal:

  • Easier to update – you can add products & categories via an online control panel, image resizing is done for you, download links are automatically created for each product;
  • Access it from anywhere – all you need is a web browser;
  • Multiple payment methods already integrated – you may be able to use PayPal, Worldpay etc.;
  • Automatic email notifications – you get notified of all new orders, your customers receive an automatic thank you message;
  • Statistics available online, all in one place;
  • You don’t need to have any technical knowledge of how to build a website;
  • You can create discounts, multiple purchase offers, use affiliate schemes, send promotional emails to get customers to return and buy again;
  • The purchase will get delivered automatically;
  • You can create content pages to fully integrate the shopping cart into your site (or make your site as a shopping cart);
  • The system will collate customers’ emails, so you can keep in touch and follow up;
  • In most systems you can send a newsletter to your customers or integrate it with e-newsletter systems like Aweber, MailChimp or Constant Contact.

So very quickly you will be able to set up and manage your online store. All you need now is to finish off that e-book you were working on for a while.

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Category : Marketing