Choosing the Best E-Commerce Software for Your Business

The foundation of any online store is its e-commerce software. This software plasma every minute of the experience of visitors, from browsing to checkout. For this reason, it is essential to choose the best e-commerce software for your business.

There are many e-commerce software programs to choose from, which is good and bad for you, well, because more choices make it more likely you'll find what you're looking for, and bad because there are actually too many for you to compare all. Fortunately, there is no need to compare all the software available to ensure your business becomes a high-quality web site - you just need to know what features are most important to look for.

Here are some important features to look for in e-commerce software.

Item Category and easy installation

E-commerce software ranges from simple shopping cart or payment options, to software that can virtually build your entire website for you. Features formulated as lists, image resizing, and the ability to copy ads in multiple categories make it easy to set up an online store.

Another feature that some e-commerce software offers is the ability to import lists from your existing store in the new program. For example, Network Solutions offers software online store that allows users to choose how you prefer to upload their listings store - a store that already exists, or an Excel spreadsheet, for example.

The ability to customize

Even thought you want the ability to easily upload the contents of your store, what you do not want is for your shop to look like everyone else. Good ecommerce software should give you the ability to customize your website so that seems uniquely yours.

Different software packages can offer in different ways. For example, Network Solutions offers an online software store with different models to choose from, allowing you to change the way the site looks. However, they are still better than e-commerce software options that offer a complete customization as one of their characteristics. For example, AspDotNetStorefront.com allows you to design fully customized "Skins" for your online store.

Excavation

One of the most popular online stores today is the ability for customers to set their own accounts. On many websites, these accounts can be set up to remember the details of payment and billing, to remember your preferences, and also allow customers to activate or deactivate the promotional mailing list.

Good ecommerce software should provide a variety of options for managing customer accounts. For instance, you can choose to store credit card information to make it easier for returning customers to make sure - or you might choose not to store sensitive payment information, to protect your customers in case your site is hacked. With software like aspdotnetstorefront.com online store, you will have the option to choose the settings like this for customer accounts.

Another thing you should consider when trying to "My Account" is the ability to customize client accounts. For example, when a customer logs on Amazon.com, the first page of the site are displayed for their suggestions based on their past purchases, and the objects seen recently. Similarly, customers who opt into the mailing list often receive emails on the basis of their trade preferences. This type of personalization tends to be very successful at encouraging repeat customers, so software online store that offers these options is literally worth its weight in gold.

Shipping Calculators

Good e-commerce software has the ability not only to calculate the total order and taxes, but also the correct shipping and handling on the order. Ideally, you should be able to choose different ways to determine shipping. For example, some online stores prefer to price shipping based on order total, while other sellers charge actual shipping rates based on weight of items purchased. In addition, you should be able to offer customers a choice between several different shipping options, such as USPS Parcel Post, USPS Priority and UPS Ground.

Another important feature of some software e-commerce is the ability to interface with USPS, UPS and FedEx. One advantage is that your customers will always be automatically charged the correct shipping rates. This function can also save you considerable time and effort: for example, EarlyImpact.com 's ProductCart even print shipping labels for the seller automatically.

Compatibility with PayPal

It 'important to any successful online store these days to have a way to accept credit cards on their own, but since the alternative payment methods like PayPal and Google Checkout are growing in popularity, it is also important to offer these choices for your customers.

Both PayPal and Google Checkout can manually walk through the creation of these options on your web site, but the process is time consuming at best, if not confusion as well. Good ecommerce software should allow you to integrate these payment options quickly and easily. For example, asp AspDotNetStorefront.com 's e-commerce software supports more than a dozen different payment gateways.

The Best E-Commerce Software

Not all software on-line store is created equal - but then, neither are the online stores. The point is that, as well as online stores differ from each other, so do the needs of their owners. No recommendation of e-commerce software is necessarily the best choice for you. The best thing for any owner of an online store is to review your choices carefully in order to find the best e-commerce software for the needs of their business ....