subject: Choosing a Wordpress Shopping Cart Plugin - 8 Factors to Consider [print this page] Good WordPress shopping carts are quite difficult to find. The majority of those that are available are still in alpha and beta development stages, and not quite ready for a production web site. This is a great pity because WordPress is the preferred tool of choice for many Internet marketers for good reason. Including the speed at which you can deploy new sites, and the myriad of tools, themes and plug-ins that are freely available.
Given the current explosion in popularity this particular development environment is experiencing I am really surprised that there are so few WordPress shopping cart options available. The coding of these scripts and plug-ins must be a lot more complex than what one would expect.
If you are researching for a shopping cart solution then the following points constitute the very least that a good system should offer -
1) If the solution requires installation on your server then it must be simple to install, and to configure. You probably do not want to pay good money to somebody else to install a complex script.
2) The shopping cart software must be quick and easy for day to day administration, via a secure web interface.
3) It must be extremely stable. You do not want any errors to occur when you have a hard earned customer busy paying you for your goods.
4) It has to be fast. The fastest shopping carts always work "in" your website. That means it does not leave your site and jump to the payment vendors site every time a buyer adds a product to their basket. I always get annoyed with shopping cart software that constantly takes ages to add items to my basket.
5) The shopping cart must "look and feel" exactly like the rest of your site. The best solution is one where your customer sees no difference between the shopping basket and the rest of your web site.
6) Usability and simplicity is paramount. It must be extremely easy for your customer to use. Many niches cater to a less sophisticated clientele (not everybody is a computer geek), and you do not want to lose sales from within the shopping cart itself because your customer does not know what button to press next.
7) The shopping cart software must provide your clients with as many payment options as possible. At the very least it must accept PayPal payments, Google Checkout payments, and also all major credit cards and debit cards.
8) Lastly, being a full-time internet marketer myself, I often sell digital "downloadable" content. So, I look for a solution that will keep all of my product download locations completely secret and secure. Unique, hacker-safe download links for each of my product items must be automatically generated on a per customer basis. These download links must be configurable in terms of the number of times they can be used (and also the length of time that they can be used) to download the particular product that has been purchased. This stops a dishonest customer from sharing the download link they receive with other people who have not purchased, thereby defrauding you of any sales.
Choosing a Wordpress Shopping Cart Plugin - 8 Factors to Consider
