Give Yourself Plenty of Time to Set up a Shopping Cart

How Not to Start a Shopping Cart Project

“How hard can it be …”

“Well, that was your job …”

These words are an expression of an attitude that could break your shopping cart project. If you start into your first shopping cart project, expecting that you can put it together in an afternoon, you will find yourself with a stressed afternoon … and evening … and next day. If you expect a staff member or contractor to put your shopping cart project together in an afternoon, you may send that person looking for employment elsewhere.

Choose Shopping Cart Software Based on your Needs

1. Match the software to the type and number of products you have available.
2. PayPal has had “Buy Now” buttons for a very long time. While they now have more sophisticated tools, Buy Now buttons are still available and are a very good tool for businesses that only have 1 to a hand full of products. But, the setup becomes inefficient after 5 – 10 products, when a more robust (complicated) system is better.
3. Shopify also has a long track record. It is structured as a “web service”. Instead of being something you add to your own website, you put your information into their shopping cart system on their servers.

How to Start a Shopping Cart Project

So, sit back, have a cup of tea or coffee, and let yourself soak in the learning curve.There are three parts of the project to plan for.

1. Understanding how to choose and use the shopping cart software.
2. Thinking through how you want your shopping cart to look and work.
3. Making sure you have all the information about your products in digital format.

What Information Do You Need about your Products

1. Do you have high quality, digital photos of all your products?
2. Do you have digital descriptions of all your products?
3. Do you have all the information about your products in a spreadsheet or other format that can be easily imported into a shopping cart system? If you don’t, products will have to be entered one at a time, and you won’t be happy with the time and cost.
4. Is that spreadsheet correct? (One time a man told us to take the list of his products from his web site. We proceeded to do that only to find that many of the products we had added were “discontinued”. He was very angry at the work we had done. But, he had not been specific.)