Top ten features to look for in shopping cart software

Shopping cart software can be a big investment for your business. If you choose it without knowing what to look for you might make the wrong choice. You may find that you’ve committed time and money to a platform that doesn’t have important features that can help you grow your business. Here are the top ten features to look for when choosing shopping cart software.

1. Easily created products and checkout pages

To use your shopping cart software you will of course need to add your products to its database. And then you will need to be able to add these buy buttons all over. You need them on sales pages on the platform or to embed them into other page builders. The question is: Is this an easy process?

If you only have one or two products, you might not mind spending time creating entries (or paying someone else to do it for you.) As an entrepreneur your time is valuable. You realize that you have better things to do with it, or higher-ROI tasks to delegate to your virtual assistant.

Does the shopping cart software platform offer a choice of checkout pages? Are they attractive? Is the UI (user interface) clean and inviting? Does it look professional and confirm the trust your almost-buyer is placing in you? Having a modern look and feel is important for conversions: actually getting someone to follow through with the purchase.

2. Easily created coupon codes

As online consumers we are trained to look for coupons and wait for sales. Note the popularity of Cyber Monday sales and the popularity of coupon sites like Retailmenot and GoodShop. Online sellers need to spin up coupon codes easily for advertising and to promote to their mailing lists.

Online shoppers spent a record $10.8 billion dollars on Cyber Monday in 2020, a 15.1% increase over 2019. Covid-19 drove some of that increase. Some experts believe that the trend will continue. The ease of shopping online will motivate even more buyers to eschew in-person purchases.

If you participate in list-building events like bundles and giveaways, you need to be able to offer your product for free. You could email a link to download a product, But invite buyers to your checkout process instead to pave the way for future sales.

Another reason for coupon codes: they add urgency to the buying process. An expiring coupon forces the prospect to get off the fence and make a buying decision.

3. Enables bump offers

Another urgency-builder is creating a bump offer. Online marketers love bump offers, low-priced add-ons to the original offer.

What is a bump offer?

When you ask someone “do you want fries with that?” you are making a bump offer.

Bump offers are great way to increase your average sale and make a customer happier at the same time. Who doesn’t like to get great value for a low price? When you offer your buyer a bump offer, you are rewarding for their decision to buy now by sweetening the pot. Hit them with an add-on offer that is just too good to pass up.

Being able to offer multiple bump offers has the potential to increase your average sale even more.

Of course, these offers should be easy to create too. It is important to get software that has the features you want. But if they never get implemented because the process is too complicated, then it is almost like the feature doesn’t exist.

4. Upsells and Downsells

Add upsells and downsells to your sales funnel strategically to persuade buyers to invest even more in your products. Your buyer will never be more excited than when they have just made the buying decision. Your sales copy was spot on! And your new buyer is jazzed that they have found a solution to their problem. That may be a new course that will give them a quick win or a gift for the critical and hard-to-buy-for Aunt Mabel. While their charge card is still warm, what are you going to offer them next?

What makes a good upsell?

Your buyer saw that your offer could help them. What is the next step? The next product should ideally remedy the same problem, but more fully or more completely. For example, if your initial offer is for a swipe file of email marketing templates, your upsell may be a related course or challenge. What would actually help the buyer use that swipe file consistently to connect to their mailing list?

Unfortunately, many shopping cart platforms don’t let you instantly present your buyer with a new buying opportunity. At best, add them to your mailing list. And you can email them later with a coupon they can use on a future purchase. If they do read that email, usually they are shopped out for the day. The magical moment has passed.

If the buyer says No to your upsell, can does your cart software let you offer them a downsell?

What is a downsell?

A downsell is an alternative offer presented to someone who has just refused the upsell you offered. Your upsell may have been too pricey, or too advanced for their level of interest. With a downsell, you can offer a mid-point offer that is either a little less expensive. Or a little less overwhelming or both.

Being able to offer multiple upsells and downsells is a plus. But even one upsell and downsell per product is more functionality than many shopping cart software platforms offer.

5. Timed offers and Dime Sales

Timed offers and dime sales give you another avenue for adding urgency to your sales funnel process.

What is a timed offer?

With a timed offer, your prospective buyer has a limited time to make a buying decision. Then the special offer expires and the price goes back up to the regular price or the standard discounted price. Set the timer for as much as an hour or as little as 15 minutes.

Use timed offers for “tripwire” offers. Present a tripwire offer just after someone has opted in to your list via a lead magnet or freebie. Timed tripwire offers can help generate a little extra income.

Motivate your new subscriber to take action. If the offer is attractively presented and priced, they will feel like they want to stick around to see more great offers from you.

The ability to deliver timed offers varies across shopping cart platforms. Some timed offers are cookie-based, allowing the timer to be set for each person. This leads to a truer urgency. The buyer can’t just capture the URL and visit the site later for the same deal after they have had time to think about it. This is a more advanced capability than setting the same deadline for all. False urgency erodes trust in the buyer’s eyes. If you would like to be able to present timed offers to your customers, look for a cookie-based capability.

What is a dime sale?

With a dime sale, the price of a product increases by a set amount with every sale or every x number of sales. The increase is traditionally a dime, hence the name “dime sale.” Dime sales are another way to add urgency to your funnels.

Note that the prospective buyer has to believe that the product will be popular. And that the price will actually go up if they wait. You will lose trust if the product is not attractively positioned and priced. The urgency you present will seem false.

6. Is the shopping cart solution stand-alone and cloud-based?

If you have a WordPress site, a popular shopping cart solution is WooCommerce. WooCommerce is a fee plugin, which makes it a popular choice. WooCommerce doesn’t work for non-WordPress sites. So if you decide at some point to move away from WordPress it is typically not a simple matter to migrate your products.

If you choose a shopping cart solution which is cloud based and not WordPress dependent, you can usually place buy buttons on any site, including a WordPress site. The buy button is a piece of HTML code which can be inserted in any landing page. This allows form greater flexibility.

Some shopping cart solutions are library-based. This means you can mix and match the products into a variety of funnels. If you can also place these into different sites, that makes your shopping cart software even more valuable for your business. Especially if you offer, or intend to offer, the same products on a variety of websites.

It is easier for you to manage all your sales funnels from a one-stop dashboard. Cloud-based shopping cart software solutions often provide analytics including data which can use to optimize conversions. (Conversions are the percent of order form visitors which complete their transactions.)

You may want to look for a shopping cart software solution which offers a mobile app. Imagine being able to manage all your funnels from your phone, while traveling or on the go.

7. Integrations

As fully-featured your shopping cart software is, it probably doesn’t do everything. That’s why you will need integrations that work with your other platforms. If you already are committed to platforms for your email marketing, course delivery, membership management, etc. then you will want to be able to continue to use them. Your choice of shopping cart shouldn’t require the complete upending of your tech stack, unless your whole tech stack is need of an overhaul.

Some shopping cart software integrates with a limited number of providers and then Zapier. While Zapier enables different apps to “talk” to one another without a native integration, most businesses that use Zapier for integrations quickly outgrow the “free” tier. When calculating the total cost of your shopping cart solution, be sure to include the cost of Zapier.

Webhooks are another integration option which usually requires a little technical knowledge to set up, but it usually without cost. APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, allow for the building of custom integrations to pass more information between your apps. API capability is one sign of an advanced solution which will grow with your business. Unless you have some web programming knowledge you will likely need to pay for help developing APIs.

8. Advanced features: analytics, A/B testing, and branching logic

Beginning marketers feel good just to get their sales funnels up and running without too much headache. Once sales are coming in, the question becomes: How do I get more sales coming in? You can either get more people in to the top of the funnel, or work on having fewer people drop off (improving conversion.) Or, preferably, both!

Fully-featured shopping cart software will collect and display the data you need to improve your your sales funnels. What percent of visitors opt in to each stage of the funnel? Where are you losing people? Having good analytics is important for this process. If they are easy to find then they are easier to monitor and make tweaks to try to improve them.

A/B testing enables you to optimize conversions

One way to test whether a change to your funnel is helping is A/B Testing. This is the ability to randomly offer one funnel set-up to some site visitors and another to others. Then you can check the stats relating to each funnel and adopt that one as the standard. Set up another A/B test, changing just one aspect, and repeat the process. This experimentation process following the scientific method will help you optimize your offers and funnels.

Send people down a different funnel path if certain criteria are met with branching logic. This is another benefit for optimizing your funnel. For example, if a buyer keeps taking upsells, you may want to continue showing upsells until they drop off. Example: Stop showing upsells once you have gotten a “No thanks” response. If a $100 upsell wasn’t appealing, then it may be unlikely they would pay $499 for your mastermind. You may want to abort the funnel based on branching logic to retain the goodwill of your buyer and not seem too “pushy” or insensitive, out of touch, or “salesy.”

9. What is the real cost?

When you compare shopping cart software solutions, take time to calculate the whole cost. This means the cost of the software, whether one-time or a monthly fee, but also any per-transaction fee that the cart software may charge. (All payment processors (for example, PayPal, Square, or Stripe) will take a percentage of each transaction, usually 2.9% and a per-transaction fee, often $.35 and you can’t get around this.)

Factor in extra expenses for integrations

If you need to switch to a more expensive email service provider if you choose a certain shopping cart, or add Zapier to your tech stack, then be sure to figure in this cost as well. Do you need to add extra software to manage an affiliate program with one option and not with another? Add up all the costs.

Headaches are a cost!

There is a cost to complexity, and certainly to poor user interfaces and inadequate tech support. Time is money, and if you are spending tons of time troubleshooting software which should serve you and not the other way around, it is a bad bargain.

Consider the reputation of the software makers. Do they use their own software? Are the creators committed to the product long-term? The last thing you want to do is to invest in software you intend to use for years only to have the company go under. It can happen to you even if you exercise your due diligence before purchase.

Some features may boost conversion and sales

Figure in extra revenue you might be able to earn through bump offers, upsells, and timed offers, etc. While this “potential” income is a little squishy and hard to pin down, these tactics do allow marketers to make more on average per sale.

Finally, does the software offer an affiliate program? Can you earn money by recommending the software? Happy users love recommending the software which helps them run their businesses. A company with happy customers will gladly pay affiliates well for their referrals. This can grow into a nice source of revenue for you also.

10. Will it grow with your business?

You may not need every feature right away, but you don’t want to build your business tech stack based only on your current needs. There can be quite a learning curve to master your software stack and you don’t want to have to start all over again just when your business is getting some traction. Remember to allow some “growing room” as you choose your software tech stack, including your shopping cart software.

Conclusion 1: Buy for the business you want, not the one you have

In this article we have covered the top ten considerations when selecting shopping cart software. A theme running throughout: buy for the business you want to have, not the one you currently have. It may be tempting to think short-term, and you may not have an option if money is very tight. But you do have to spend money to make money.

Just as career counselors will advise to dress for the job you want, not the job you have, you have to present yourself professionally online, and one way to do this is by ensuring that the user interfaces and look and feel of your tech stack are consistent with the image you want to project. Beyond surface-level factors, there can be significant differences between software capabilities, some of which impact revenue.

Be sure to take a look at all these factors before selecting shopping cart software for your business.

Conclusion 2: MintBird, the new kid on the shopping cart block, promises to be a winner

MintBird is a brand-new shopping cart software platform which will be released July 29, 2021. It makes the grade on all these features, and even more will be rolled out after the initial launch. The team behind Mintbird is the same one behind software platform EverLesson and viral contest platform CompeteUp.

These software products are designed to work together and complement one another, yet all are stand-alone. All are used by the co-founders, Chad Nicely and Perry Belcher, in their own businesses and they are committed to continually improving them.

In order to launch MintBird with a splash, Mr. Nicely and Mr. Belcher have been expanding and training an affiliate “street team.” If you have ever been interested in improving your affiliate marketing skills and gaining advanced tips and strategies from veteran marketers, consider joining the team.