1) Shopping Cart Responsiveness: Test your potential shopping cart for speed. If it is too slow you could frustrate your customers. Consider another shopping cart program. If you are still in the planning stage, this is the time to make sure the programming works the way you want. If you are looking at a commercial online shopping cart program find existing stores that are using it and try them out. If you have a large number of products the cart may be slower.
2) Visible Contact Information: Include complete physical address and telephone contact information. This can be a seperate page but there should be a link to it on every page. Hiding your identity (whether intentional or not) lowers the confidence level of shoppers. There are also many online shoppers like to select the product in an online shopping cart then phone in the actual order.
3) Visible Privacy Policy: Internet privacy is a big concern among many e-commerce shoppers. Establish a firm privacy policy page, link to it from every page, and abide by it. This is an easy item to miss but it is important to some online shopping cart users and popular news items may make it important to the majority of shoppers on any given day.
4) Visible Return Policy: Having a return policy page provides some comfort to customers that are not familiar with you. You may stand behind your product or service 100% but your potential online shopping cart customer does not know this unless you make it clearly available to them on your site. Let your customers know what to do in case they have experience any problems. Visible return and warranty information helps build confidence in your store.
5) Easy Shopping Cart Navigation and Product Organization: Complicated shopping carts may drive customers away. We want customers to easilly drill down to their desired product with just a few clicks and be able to move from one product or category to another with ease. Try to arrange drop down lists so that similar or related products and categories are near each other. Some shopping carts arrange lists in the order they were entered so it is a good idea to handle product organization before they are entered.
Thank you for your inputs, what are the most used shopping cards, what are you using?
I have been researching oscommerce and zencart, for now they are the one I prefer but it would be great if someone could come up with other suggestions.
Thats an very important part, if your e-commerce website is loading to slow you will lose a bunch of new customers.... now a days, pepople don't want to wait for the page to load, if they can't get the page to load right away they will jump to the next site...
I'd go with Prestashop. Open source, very active community, robust script, tons of addons & templates (although most of the good ones are not for free ).
Also, most third part processors are included and it's quite easy to plugin you own merchant account.
Few live shops running under Prestashop:
Johnson's Popcorn
Artoyz - Designer & Art Toys, Figurines a Customiser, Graphic Design & Pop Culture. - Artoyz
