Is a shopping cart right for you?

If you sell products online, you likely use a shopping cart service, such as 1ShoppingCart or Practice Pay Solutions. Shopping carts help automate the online shopping process, making the daily lives 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 coach, for example, and you only sell your coaching 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 e-books and audio programs, how much time do you spend processing orders for those products? Not only can a cart help you process orders 24/7, but it’s also fully automated. You can sell products while you sleep! This saves you time to do what is most important to you, like advising your clients.

If you sell products of any kind online, it makes a lot of 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 taken out of 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 your virtual assistant) who can walk you through and help you get your cart up and running in no time.