Is a shopping cart right for you?
If you sell products online, chances are you use a shopping cart service, like 1ShoppingCart or Practice Pay Solutions. Shopping carts help automate the online shopping process, making the daily life of business owners much easier. On the other hand, if you only sell services, you may or may not use this type of service. How do you know whether or not you should invest in a shopping cart to help automate your business?
Start with your business and what you are selling. If you’re a trainer, for example, and you only sell your trainer services in terms of time, you probably don’t need a shopping cart. You can still accept credit cards, as long as you have a merchant account.
However, if you are a trainer who also sells products, such as eBooks and audio programs, how much time do you spend processing orders for those products? A cart can not only help you process orders 24/7, but it is also fully automated. You can sell products while you sleep! This saves you time to do what’s most important to you, like advising your clients.
If you sell products of any kind online, it makes perfect sense to automate the checkout process with a shopping cart. The shopping cart interface can be customized for your business so your customers don’t even know they’re being pulled from your site to process their order.
Having recently completed a training course on setting up and maintaining shopping carts, I understand what is involved and have already helped some of my clients with this time consuming process. The setup process is somewhat technical, but there are usually helpful support staff (or their virtual assistant) who can walk you through and help you get your cart up and running in no time.
