Choosing the RIGHT e-Commerce Solution for your Website

If you are planning on creating an online store, it is important that you select the right solution. By choosing the appropriate software, you will be able to minimize your costs and have a e-Commerce store that works great for your business now and in the future.

Below, we’ve listed some things that you should consider before moving forward.

Selecting the Right Shopping Cart

The first step in building your ideal solution is to decide on the shopping cart or e-Commerce software for your website. Of course, you can build your own custom solution, but if you want to minimize costs and avoid security issues, it is best to select a tried and true solution.

Now, there are five main things that you should consider:

1. Price (both initial and ongoing costs)
2. Depth of integration
3. Features
4. Ease of maintenance
5. Documentation & Support

Price

For most business, price is probably the most important metric for choosing a solution. So when deciding on your e-Commerce software, be sure to consider both the price of the software and the costs for having a developer integrate it into your website. Also, be sure to consider any ongoing licensing, maintenance, and upgrade fees.

Some software packages, for example, are free while others may cost several thousand dollars! So be sure to consider ALL of the costs before moving forward.

Depth of integration

The next thing you need to consider is how ‘seamless’ of a customer experience do you want. For example, do you want all payment processing to be done on your own website? Or would you prefer that customers be redirected to an external website for payment? And if you already have a payment processor, how well does the software work with that payment gateway?

Features

Another big priority is the feature set. The best solution will have a robust set of features to satisfy your current and future needs. So when choosing your solution, find one with a large feature set and readily available add-ons or modules. (Note: Some software packages charge additional fees for any modules outside of the core feature set.)

Ease of Maintenance

Once your new online store is launched, your work is not done. Instead, you will have ongoing things to take care of, such as price changes, adding new products, updating images, retrieving order information, and changing sitewide settings. As a result, you need a solution that will easily enable you to take care of ALL of this, and more.

Be sure to select a software package that makes maintenance easy. After all, it might be unreasonably expensive to hire a web developer for each and every change to your website.

Documentation & Support

Sometimes, things go wrong and it is important to get answers RIGHT AWAY. When selecting your solution, find one that has extensive documentation to answer all of your questions. Better yet, see if there is a support forum or knowledge base. And some solutions even have an optional paid support plan.

For more information on building your e-Commerce website, read our article Accept Payment Online With PayPal. And stay tuned for our article on e-Commerce solutions that we use and recommend.