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Top 10 must-have features Ecommerce

If youâ € ™ re an online merchant, you already understand the importance to have a professional website. But do you know that offers e-commerce are essential to make your website successful sales and managing your product long term?

As the choice of technologies and providers Cart e-commerce solutions on the market continues to grow and for your life company, there are a handful of essential features and function-units that you must insist on having. If a professional and compelling design is necessary â € € and can œmakeâ your business, e-commerce functionality or poor who can not set â € œbreakâ € your business just as easily.

To help you navigate the sea of ​​platforms and competing e-commerce to identify the best solution for your business, Iâ € ™ ve compiled this list of ten must-have features e-commerce you should be looking for (and ask questions) you are looking for a shopping cart capable of serving your store Online.

1. Search Engine Friendliness youâ € ™ ll want your shopping cart solution to provide you the control your own title tags, meta descriptions and keywords so you can easily optimize at will to search engines. Youâ € ™ ll want also your solution to automatically generate keyword rich URL based on your product and category names and generate code page that is XHTML compliant 1.0 Strict.
2. PCI Compliant Hosting & Security Because your site will need to accept payments online you have to find a provider that can host your website in a PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliant environment. If you donâ € ™ t know anything about PCI compliance, youâ € ™ ll need to understand your role in compliance with the DSS (Data Security Standards). Currently, the card industry mandates that any merchant, organization or software that processes, stores or disseminates credit card data must comply with the PCI DSS or they risk hefty fines and / or lose the ability to process cards credit altogether thus putting the entire company at risk. Although there is much more involved in PCI compliance than just accommodation your site in a compliant environment, this is your first step.
3. Up-selling and selling features of the Red Cross Up-selling offers its customers a product that is of greater value than the product they are looking into or adding options / features they buy the product in order to increase their spending. Cross-selling refers to selling items that are complementary to the element they buy. Be sure to make these technologies a part of your marketing plan at a time online and off. Any appropriate technology shopping cart will provide automated functions which can accomplish these marketing techniques for you with a few simple set-up. Make sure your shopping cart solution offers these valuable tools recommendation.
4. Product Feature Product Rating review are a product of very powerful marketing tool. In fact, research shows that even the bad reviews help sell more product that shows no reviews for a product at all. Youâ € ™ ll want an e-commerce solution that allows you to enable customers post reviews of products you sell. You can still view the messages before you choose to view or choose to automatically display the comments on the site.
5. In a flexible pricing management youâ € ™ ll want to find a shopping cart that offers features flexible pricing and allows you to develop pricing options to consider several things such as promotional pricing for any product, customer, order, or timetable, wholesale or retail prices (or both) displayed to your customers via the same interface that lets you catalog and price establishment of membership, agrees coupon codes, allows pricing based on quantity and is supported by tax-exempt.
6. Robust catalog management to find a solution that allows you to get your store up and running quickly by offering a bulk import / export your catalog. Youâ € ™ ll see that this feature will support you throughout the life cycle of your business and not just at startup. Make sure the solution also offers products to simplify the cloning of additions to the catalog, automatic resizing of images of products and strong management capabilities stocks, such as allowing you to set minimum and identify items that are out of stock.
7. Solid Search Analytics & Reporting solution that integrates with Google Analytics to show real-time site and collating data search and offers a variety of other performance reporting capabilities, which youâ € ™ ll need to accurately track your business. Make sure you can export and save reports.
8. Integrated Shipping youâ € ™ ll want Your cart solution for integration with major transport providers such as USPS, UPS and Fedex and youâ € ™ ll want to markup shipping rates quotes by a percentage or a fixed amount so that you have the option to charge handling fees transparent.
9. Product Feed support youâ € ™ ll want your basket to have a solution based power products that allow you to easily create flow of your products that you can download on price comparison sites (aka â € œshopping enginesâ €) as Shopzilla Shopping.com, Google Product Search, etc. and that will allow you to create products of multiple signals for each comparison engine.
10. Gift Certificate / Features Wishlist gift certificate and desires are two website features that play a major role in the conversion of holiday sales (according Demandware study). 64 percent of respondents said gift certificates equaled 25 percent of their purchases online and half of the respondents said they came with someone else's gift ideas. So make sure you use these features on your site and do not consider an e-commerce solution that does not boast a gift certificate online wishlist robust feature set.

Take an informed decision when choosing a solution for your ecommerce site can be the difference between a successful online business and which failed in the first year, 50 percent of e-commerce companies new to do. Thus, when evaluating your options carefully take some time and effort, investment in research of your ProviderA € ™ s e-commerce features will be carefully well worth it as your online business grows.

About the Author

Taunia Kipp is the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Information Security Officer for Mountain Media, a privately held corporation located in Saratoga Springs, NY and serving national markets. The company’s proprietary eCommerce management platform, known as “Mountain Commerce†boasts the top ecommerce features in the industry and was named to Practical eCommerce magazine’s list of notable shopping cart solutions in late 2007. Additionally, the company offers a full compliment of commercial Web services such as Search Engine Marketing, Graphic Design, Web Hosting and Merchant Services.

Learn more at: www.mountainmedia.com

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