What features would be in the ultimate shopping cart system?

Just curious what you're thoughts are on this. I guess what should NOT be in the ultimate shopping cart should be posted too.

There is no such thing a ultimate shopping cart system. There is how ever the most shopping cart you can buy with the less money that would work for you. I have some suggest for you:

1) You or your programmer must be able to make changes to the shopping. No shopping cart will work for everybody. Everybody would need custom changes. Find one that your can make changes. If you are ASP person, look for ASP shopping cart.
2) Read the code and read the code again. Read the code one more time. Can you understand the code? Can you deal with the code?
3) Free trial before buying. You will never know if the shopping cart will work for your operation until you actually use it.
4) If you are interested in SEO, you want to find out if the shopping cart has dynamic meta tag. Some shopping car have the same title, description and keywords for all pages. It would be hard to rank well without dynamic meta tags.
5) You want to find out if the shopping cart use mile long URL which may scare away the search engine robot. Absolute, positively no Session ID in URL.
6) Online UPS and USPS shipping cost calculator.
7) Built in multiple credit card processor gateway.
8) Is there a tech support forum? Go to the tech support forum and read messages.

The list of feature do not mean anything. You got to try it and use it before you can really tell.

Ok, great responses from a business point of view, but I should have made my post clearer, I meant from a user perspective that doesn't care about the backend.

For example:

User profiles or no profiles?
Go to cart after putting something in it or go back to product page?
Email notifications of orders
Look up status of order
Save credit card info for next time?

Hmm I have a different view. Your shopping cart should be:-

1)Simple
2)Secure
3)Alterable by the customer and yourself
4)Fast

There is no other way of looking for a shopping cart except from a business point of view. There is so much detail in buying a shopping cart. I am just giving you some of the most important features.

You can easily spend lot of money to buy a shopping cart that look very nice but is unmanageable or difficult to update. If your shopping cart have no chance of getting your products in the search engine, you would not need a shopping cart because few will never find your products.

Non specific "features" like "simple, secure, fast" will not help in choosing a shopping cart. Every shopping cart site will tell you their shopping cart is "simple, secure and fast". However, your idea of user profile may not be the same as the people who wrote the shopping cart. I am sure every shopping cart looks very attractive on paper and have similar user features.

The devil is in the detail!









[ Message was edited by: atozcom 10/29/2003 07:18 am ]

"There is no other way of looking for a shopping cart except from a business point of view. "

How can you say that? I think number one should be from the user perspective. If your customers are happy, the business is happy. Do you think your customer cares that you can modify the cart? Do they care that it's difficult to update the products? Do they care that there is a tech support forum for the cart software? Like come on. I am not asking which cart to buy (we made our own shopping systems so that is irrelevant). Lets assume that we didn't buy a piece'o's**t cart and it is flexilbe and it doesn't have long urls and can process credit card transactions and it has support forums, now lets stick to the question I am asking, which is what is the best cart FROM A USER PERSPECTIVE.

Well I stick by my guns. I have built about 30 carts and too much detail confuses the customer.

a flexible search facility

site cart view like staples.com where it shows the list on anypage you are on - this is my favorite to use from a consumers point of view.

Let me know about your shopping cart - I am looking to change when I find one that is good, but affordable to a small business.

-Debunked-