What shoppingcart to use for your online business.

So you are about to start (or have already started) an online business. Inevitably the question you should be asking yourself right now is…

What shopping cart should I use for my online business?

When you go to open your online storefront you will have to decide what shopping cart software and customer management software you are going to use to manage and automate your prospects, customers, partners, and overall business.

Choosing an ecommerce shopping cart solution can be overwhelming, so the first thing you want to do is write a list of what you need and then research providers. You can compare which of them have the right tools and features. Not all shopping carts are the same; some are suited for certain products and some are best suited for small, medium, or larger businesses. Some solutions do not allow you to sell digital products and some do not have real phone support. So make sure you choose a reputable partner by doing a thorough shopping cart comparison to determine which is best to power your online storefront. This will help make sure that you will feel confident in the site and the shopping experience you create.

To help save you a ton of time in choosing your cart, we have formulated a list of the top 11 potential shopping carts you can use. Now, we use and recommend #1 on our list SecurePayPro.com because it has all of the features and functions that our internet business needs and uses.

1. SecurePayPro.com

2. Pinnaclecart.com

3. 1shoppingcart.com

4. Networksolutions.com

5. Corecommerce.com

6. 3dcart.com

7. x-cart.com

8. Infusionsoft.com

9. Bigcommerce.com

10. Mivamerchant.com

11. Goldbar.net

Some of the features and functions of a shopping cart you should look into are:

You need your shopping cart to be equally adept at handling digital products (including secure digital product & membership form delivery), and tangible, offline products (including variable shipping & tax calculations). Some things you may want to be sure are in your shopping cart are:

Freedom from complicated CGI programming! We recommend for your shopping cart to have a dummy-proof wizard that lets you tell it what you want, then just click a button and you get it! Background images, custom colors — the sky should be the limit. Or use one of our professionally-designed default pages and have your form up in seconds .

Real-time credit card acceptance with your existing Merchant Account through many of the major processing gateways — including Authorize.net, Skipjack, eComExchange, and EMS .

Advanced recurring billing gives you the flexibility to offer free or specially priced trials, multiple recurring periods and pricing with term discounts calculated automatically. You want to be able to pay recurring commissions on rebills!

Secure digital product delivery allows for it for customers to download your product without knowing its location!

Automatic download link expiration after 24 hours to ensure that only paid customers get access to your stuff.. You can even select multiple “bonus items” to be downloaded with the product and offer further incentives to increase your sales. You need your system to automatically create the appropriate download page!

Extended download options allow you to extend the download link expiration for a day, a year or indefinitely. You can make this extended download available for free or for an extra fee, and the option will appear on your order form automatically! Use this to create an instant upsell or value-add to your offer.

Customizable HTML “thank you” pages for each product . A great thing to use in your shopping cart is customizable thank you pages for each and every product you have in your database. The ability to use order variables to completely personalize your customer’s experience is a huge plus.

Automatic affiliate program integration. Imagine never having to figure out who earned what again! Let your shopping cart sort it out for you using the affiliate rules you set up! And be sure that your shopping cart uses foolproof affiliate tracking to attract new affiliates, too!

Simple Up-selling on either the order forms or thank you pages. It needs to be as easy as adding a link to you web pages!

Forced continuity. You might want the ability to sell a front-end product for one price today, and give your customers a free trial to your membership program and automatically rebill them each and every month (or on whatever time period you choose).

1-Click Upsell System

The 1-Click Upsell is hands-down the most powerful way to increase your bottom line, and it should be 100% automated. Multiple case studies have shown increased revenues of 266% to over 1,000% . Here’s how 1 click up sell technology works:

1 Click Operation When your customer chooses to purchase one of your “back-end” offers, the system should instantly and automatically recharges the card they just used to make the initial purchase. This means they don’t have to enter any further information, so you make more sales!

Create Unlimited Upsell / Downsell Paths After your customer makes a purchase you might want to show a special offer for a different product before they see your thank you page . If they say “Yes” you can show them another offer or send them to the thank you page. And if they say “No” you can show them yet another offer or send them to the thank you page. You should be able to do this as many times as you want to add successive upsells and downsells to increase your per customer value .

Real-time credit card acceptance with your existing Merchant Account through many of the major processing gateways — including Authorize.net, Skipjack, eComExchange, and EMS .

Automated Digital Deliver After the upsell / downsell process is complete, your customer needs to be automatically logged into your Customer Center , where they can see all their purchases and download all their digital products from one convenient location.

Custom HTML Each and every one of your back-end offers should allow you to enter full HTML code (or plain text) so you can use all your best sales skills to increase conversions.

TRUE One-time & Special Offers Now you can honestly say to your customers that they will not see this offer again, because it is dynamically generated only after an initial purchase. Our test show that limited offers convert up to 69% or more!

Drop-dead Simple! Using a 1-Click Upsell System should be easy. You want the ability to simply enter the upsell text or HTML for the upsell product you want to sell and then tell the front-end product to show the upsell product before the thank you page. Done. And all your customers have to do is click one “Yes! Add to my order.” button at the bottom of your offer.

HUGE Sales Increases In a live case study, we turned $37 customers into $171 customers. That’s a 460% increase – all do to the 1-Click Upsell System. We used 2 upsells and 3 downsells in this chain, and it works like magic!

You need your shopping cart to have a complete, INTEGRATED, Hands-Free Affiliate System

Do you run an affiliate program? More than one? An affiliate program is a double-edged sword — the more affiliates you have, the more money you make, but the more time it takes to track it all!

Your shopping cart needs to take over the grunt work, freeing you to do other more important things — like grow your business…

You need the kind of control that instantly puts you in the driver’s seat and allows you to manipulate every aspect of your affiliate program — and leaves to handle the program for you using…

Instant Affiliate Sign-up. Recruit hundreds, even thousands of affiliates to promote any or all of your products. They should be able to sign-up through a special link and get immediate access to sell your various products and services!

Complete Affiliate Management. Your shopping cart should have real-time statistics for both your affiliates and yourself — see who your best promoters are at the click of a button! And never have to worry — or hear about — missed sales commissions again. With commissions are calculated automatically and accurately. Whether you have a single commission or two-tiered commission on each product you sell — even if you have both! — Your cart needs to handle the math for you.

Recurring Billing Support. If you sell recurring products such as memberships, you want your shopping cart to automatically calculate recurring commissions each time your customers are re-billed.

Support for Custom Commission Structures. A great feature to have is the ability to assign unique commission structures to individual affiliates — great for joint ventures that offer higher commissions rates to specific affiliates!Optional “Seamless” Integration Scripts let you create the illusion that your own site is managing everything — when in fact your shopping cart does it all for you!

Instant Commission Payments. Export a list of commissions to upload and pay via PayPal.com or simply import into Quickbooks or other applications that allow automated check writing. It’s the easiest and most efficient way to pay out affiliates and your shopping cart should automate this for you.

Affiliate Mail Merge. Email your affiliates at will with their information automatically merged into the body or subject of the email message. This is a great tool that allows you to deliver your affiliates and JV partners your promotional material ready for them to use.

Custom Affiliate Center: Your shopping cart should have a custom affiliate center that lets you include complete training material and promotional literature with pre-personalized and hard-coded affiliate IDs tagged into them. Your affiliates should have the ability to copy, paste, and promote your products and services— easy as 1-2-3! You need to have complete control over their promotional materials!

Affiliate Ad Tracking. A great feature of your shopping cart should be to give your affiliates their own ad tracking tools.

Autoresponders for Affiliates let you follow up and deliver training information to them at predefined intervals to turn even the softest wasteful slackers into trained, hard-core affiliates!

Powerful Email System. Your affiliates should have the benefits of a complete foolproof tracking system , plus the marketing campaign tool — it needs to be a complete system for affiliate success for an unlimited number of products!

SecurePayPro.com is the system we use to generate over 80% of our own sales! Imagine the increased profitability your company could see. And what’s more, you can use this affiliate platform for your own products.

Advanced Affiliate Reports

What to run an affiliate contest by:

Most clicks

Most sales

Most subscribes

Most new affiliates

Most revenue

Your shopping cart should allow you to do so. The new affiliate reports allow you to see exactly how many clicks, sales, subscribers and affiliates each one of your affiliate has referred to you. You can also see the total revenues, so you can run contests on anything you want.

Comprehensive Campaign Tracking Tools

Stop guessing whether your marketing campaigns are working. Stop guessing, stop wondering, stop worrying. And stop wasting money!

Web Site Trackers calculate the “ad profitability” for every marketing campaign you launch, and instantly separates the winners from the losers. You need to know which ones to keep, and which ones to dump!

Track eZine ads, banner swaps, pay-per-click keyword bids and much more. You should be able to track search engine traffic as well as keyword and keyphrase denominations!: You should know:

Managing Multiple Mailing Lists With Follow-up Power

Auto responder management should give you the control you used to only dream of. You can do more to build your business — at a fraction of the effort and expense you used to have to take.

Remember; smart automation is the key! Some of the things you want with your mailing list management are:

Create unlimited email lists, perfect for storing opt-in prospect and subscriber databases that you can email to with new promotions or company information whenever you wish!

Install unlimited sequential follow-up autoresponders . Send pre‑personalized and merged content at predefined intervals to follow-up with your hottest prospects and turn them into customers!

Multiple List Management lets you create product-specific autoresponders or automatically subscribed your customers to any of your email series lists when they purchase a product from you. You can even choose different lists for different products.

Advanced Email Tracking provides you with critical statistics that automatically calculate the following for every email you send:

Complete mail merge personalization lets you add that personal touch to your prospect emails, making a special message just for them!

Instant entry and exit pop-up forms and subscription boxes increase your subscriber rate by up to150% and more! With powerful, easy-to-use wizards, you can do it in just a few mouse clicks!

Spam management ensures that you never send unsolicited emails out.

Automatic subscribe/unsubscribe processing system manages your email list for you, letting your subscribers remove themselves from any mailing list.

Your shoppingcart needs to automatically grab the IP address of anyone who subscribes to one of your mailing lists, so you have an official “seal of proof” that protects you if anyone ever accuses you of spamming — a great tool to avoid sticky situations!

FULLY Integrated Customer Relationship Management

You’ve heard of Customer Relationship Management systems — CRM. Maybe you’ve even seen it in action. It’s something the big boys use to maintain a customer’s status throughout their life cycle from visitor to prospect to customer. CRM is an invaluable tool. Some of the things you need to know about your CRM are:

Membership Management Integration

You may want your shopping cart to be integrated with several popular membership management systems, including VisionGate and Wishlist Member . This integration makes running your membership site a snap:

Fully Integrated systems allow for automatic account creation, suspension, upgrades and downgrades based on payment history.

Automatic Account Creation means that once you’ve enter a few simple details in each of your systems you don’t have to manage your members manually. When they make purchase their account is automatically created in your members area and set to the correct membership level depending on which product they purchased.

Automatic Downgrades prevents people from cheating you. If one of your members ever stops paying, will notify your membership software and tell it to downgrade the member so they can no longer access your paid content.

Order History shows your customers a history of every order they’ve placed with you including the status of each order. This way your customers can quickly see if their order has been processed or if a refund has been issued without having to ask you!

So to save you a ton of time in choosing your cart, we have formulated a list of 10 potential shopping carts you can use. Now we use and recommend #1 SecurePayPro.combecause it has all of the features and functions that are internet business needs and uses. Remember, when selecting a cart to use, it is wise to do your own due research and figure out what system will fit your business needs to a ‘T’: