In today’s world of online shopping, shoppers are becoming increasingly savvy, with an expectation that they’ll be delighted at every click. Having a user friendly shopping experience and convenient purchase journey are table stakes.
The right ecommerce solution can minimize the effort it takes to start engaging customers today and enable you take advantage of the latest technological improvements in online selling.
Rather than building a solution from the ground up, you can choose from one of the multiple solutions available in your region. However, choosing an ecommerce solution is no easy task - various factors come into play when you are deciding which offering to go for.
Here are three questions and supporting scenarios to consider as you are integrating with a new shopping cart or switching solutions:
1. Why should you consider a shopping cart solution?
Ease of integration
If you are just starting out and looking to setup an online store, it is easier to go with an ecommerce solution. An ecommerce solution will be equipped to handle most of the standard activities that are required to run the store like order management and shipment processing. This allows you to focus more on running your store and less on the configuration. With certain solutions, you may not even require a technical team to set up and run your store.
Convenient access to third party applications
Typically, an ecommerce solution is already integrated with prominent third party solutions that facilitate commerce online. These third party solutions can fall into multiple domains like shipping, email campaigns, payment services and more. You can take advantage of these pre-built integrations and quickly implement them into your store.
Intuitive order management
An ecommerce solution is equipped to handle basic tasks that you would need to administer your store on a day to day basis, including activities like order management and handling logistics. Having this mechanism built into the ecommerce solution will allow your team to easily manage the backend administrative tasks and leave you to focus on what’s important for your business.
Intelligent data analysis
It is very important to have data that allows you to understand how your store is performing. A good ecommerce solution will provide you with actionable reports and in-depth analysis on how well your store is doing. These insights can help you understand where your shoppers are dropping off, compare against previous sales and more. It is very beneficial to take stock of the performance of your store and consequently, improve the shopping experience for your customers.
Benefit from modern technological changes
The world of internet is rapidly changing and browsers are frequently updated to take advantage of recent changes in order to provide a faster experience for customers. A competent ecommerce solution is constantly evolving to utilize these modern technologies and your store can benefit from these changes without requiring any manual intervention from you.
2. How should I choose a shopping cart solution?
Consider your requirements carefully
You need to carefully think about your business goals and then determine how an ecommerce solution will help you facilitate these goals. Evaluate your requirements carefully to determine what it is that you are expecting the ecommerce solution to deliver for your business. Choose a solution that is the most aligned with your business goals.
The solution should cater to your long term plans
As your business grows, an ecommerce solution that has worked well for you in the past may not continue to do so well in the future. Keep in mind the direction of your business and the scaling capabilities of your ecommerce solution. Among many things, you need to validate if the solution can continue to handle the increased customer load, if the solution can handle any new business processes you have implemented and if there are other ecommerce solutions that are more aligned with your business.
Look before you leap
Most ecommerce solutions will provide you an easy way to try out their solution, although some capabilities are limited in the trial. Depending on the solution, you can either download an instance of the solution or sign up for a trial period. Use this opportunity understand the pros and cons of using an ecommerce solution and how it fits into your business.
Choose a solution that your technical team is equipped to handle
Some ecommerce solutions are inherently more complex. Usually, the complexity of managing an ecommerce solution is higher depending on the degree to which the solution can be customized. You need to go for a solution depending on the size of your business and for most cases, the choice of your ecommerce solution should reflect the amount of customization that is required for your business. For ecommerce solutions that are more complex, you need to have a competent technical team that can not only integrate, but also manage and maintain the solution. You can also outsource the technical work to development agencies that specialize in integrating with particular ecommerce solutions.
Review third party extension availability
There are numerous third party extensions or plugins available for most ecommerce solutions, these extensions help facilitate an easier integration with most commonly used business applications. Make sure you review the available third party solutions and the ease with which they can be integrated into your business processes.
3. When should I consider other solutions for managing my online commerce experience?
Your business is very unique
If you have a business that is unique, standard processes that are common to most businesses may not be applicable to yours. As a result, some of the advantages of going with an ecommerce solution are irrelevant for you. In such a scenario, it may be easier to build a custom solution that is more attuned to your business needs.
You have a large development team
Building a custom solution is not easy and doing so will require you to have a dev team that has a thorough understanding of how your business works and how an online store will help facilitate your business goals. Your development team should also have a good understanding of ecommerce best practices.
You want to keep your data highly secure
If your business deals with highly critical or sensitive data, you may want to ensure that this data is only passed through your internal systems and is stored safely on your servers. Owning all the components of your ecommerce system is one way to ensure that confidential data never leaves your domain.
Amazon Pay is integrated into several prominent shopping cart solutions. You can realize the benefits of Amazon Pay by choosing any one of the supported solutions in the list, which offer an easy integration. Amazon Pay is also available for a custom integration outside of a specific shopping cart.
Learn more about Amazon Pay and the shopping carts we work with.