Web Marketing All-in-One For Dummies, 2nd Edition
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Sales are the final goal of web marketing. From a revenue standpoint, it is absolutely critical to set up your shopping cart to sell online — and to sell well.

Shopping Cart Setup Action Benefit
Customize the look of the order page to match the appearance of the rest of your website. Users aren’t distracted by an abrupt change in look and feel.
Assure that all images are uploaded to a secure directory. An error message won’t display when visitors click from your sales page to the order page.
Display the item description, quantity being ordered, and price on the order page. Buyers are assured that they’re paying for only what they want.
Display that either credit cards or PayPal (or both) can be used as the payment source. You show willingness to accommodate customers’ preferences.
Remove all navigation buttons from the order page. This prevents tempting the buyer to exit the purchasing process.
Create a custom Thank You page for each individual product sold. This gives you the possibility for cross-selling.
Create an autoresponder for each product, which is an e-mail or sequence of e-mails automatically sent to a customer upon purchase. You can add a customer to a specific list to market later with back-end sales offers.

Premium Web Cart is a good choice for a shopping cart. It’s one of the few shopping cart systems offering free technical support by telephone. Features of Premium Web Cart include

  • Ease of use: You can easily add to and maintain product items in the shopping cart without having to pay a designer or programmer.

  • Feature-rich: No other package at this price level offers the cart, affiliate program, e-mail broadcasting, membership, customer relation management program, project tracking, and inventory.

  • Premade graphics: The system creates attractive Add to Cart buttons for you: Just copy and paste the code to your website.

  • Customizability: The capability to make your order pages look just like the rest of your website.

  • Payment options: These enable you to offer payments through PayPal, your merchant account, or both.

  • Coupons: Using coupons enables you to run specific promotions and to track their effect on sales.

  • Custom Thank You pages: This is one of the rarest features of low-end shopping carts and one of the most important for increasing sale value per customer.

    When folks make a purchase through your shopping cart, they already have their credit card on the table. Only through the use of a custom Thank You page can you make that special offer while their credit card is still out of their pocket and you have their undivided attention.

  • Built-in affiliate program: You don’t need to find a third-party, affiliate-tracking system to manage your shopping cart. It’s all integrated already.

  • Digital download capable: If you have an e-book or MP3 audio files, you can set them up in the system to be downloaded upon purchase instead of hosting the files on your own server.

  • Built-in autoresponders and mailing system: An autoresponder is an automated system that sends a message (that you create) to someone that requests information from you. You’ll find a direct correlation between folks receiving automated or routine e-mails from you and their willingness to purchase your products or services.

  • Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) Compliance: Premium Web Cart satisfies all testing requirements for keeping your transactions secure from hackers. It invests thousands of dollars each year to maintain compliance so you do not have that added expense to pay yourself.

  • Free telephone technical support: This is the most important feature, as well as the hardest to find these days. If you choose to sell products online, it’s only a matter of time before you need some help. Never subscribe to a shopping cart system that doesn’t offer support when you need it.

Premium Web Cart is a great solution for all levels of marketers and companies. With the increase of penalties for PCI Compliance violations, you should always use a third-party company to host the online transaction process.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book authors:

John Arnold is the author of E-Mail Marketing For Dummies and coauthor of Mobile Marketing For Dummies.

Ian Lurie is President of Portent, Inc.

Marty Dickinson is President of HereNextYear.

Elizabeth Marsten is Director of Search Marketing at Portent, Inc.

Michael Becker is the Managing Director of North America at the Mobile Marketing Association.

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