When you are ready to begin selling your products online, there are many “shopping cart” products available for your consideration.
In last month’s article, we talked about some of the less expensive, less customizable options for getting your retail business online. In most cases, we don’t recommend those “off-the-shelf”
options for several reasons. Most importantly, the customization available with those “one size fits all” solutions is very limited. As a result, you can end up with a finished product that doesn’t fully meet the needs of your business. Or worse, you’ll spend a lot more time and money just trying to make it do the things you need it to do. So the “less expensive” option can cost you more than you ever imagined.
Secondly, these products generally come with a major learning curve. You’ll need to learn all about the shopping cart system you purchase by reading manuals and implementation guides. Or you end up paying someone else to help you understand the product. Just as with any other business purchase, make sure the system you choose to invest in is one you personally understand – and that it can meet the needs of your business without needing to hire a full time consultant.
One of the biggest problems we see with many other products our clients have purchased elsewhere - and then bring to us to “please make it work” - is poor coding technique. Most clients shouldn’t ever have to be bothered with code – that “behind the scenes” computer language that makes the system work. But if you don’t know your developer’s level of experience with coding, it could mean costly changes for you in the future.
So, is there a better solution? Yes.
We always recommend a custom-developed shopping cart product to make sure our clients get the best of all worlds. Through years of working with many businesses to develop their systems, we have created a product that combines the affordability of pre-written code with the extendibility to be readily customized so that it fits every need of any specific business. It provides a very flexible and easy solution.
To make implementation of our custom shopping cart both simple and complete, we meet with each client to discuss their needs. We show them the basic shopping cart and explain the functions it includes. Then we talk about which customizations need to be done to fit those needs. On average, 75% of our new system implementations do don’t need any significant customizations. We just give the new shopping cart a professional graphic design to match the look of their business and they are ready to start selling online.
Based in Valencia, Magical Productions provides full-service Internet production, including Web site design,custom shopping carts, search engine optimization and marketing. You can find the company online at http://www.magicalproductions.net. Contact via email at hello@magicalproductions.net or phone at 661-977-9509.