What features do you look for from an ecommerce cart?

[obscure]

Hi all,

A bit of a bizarre question here - but we are looking at what features should be the main things we should promote from our ecommerce cart, and I reckon these should probably be the things that most people look for when deciding who to go to for their shopping cart design.

If you have a few minutes to spare could you let me know your top 5 things from an ecommerce website designer / provider / cart that you would look for.

For eg:
- administration panel for adding products / categories
- ability to accept various payment methods
- can offer discount coupons
- custom design not templates
- anything else, these are just a few of the things we've thought of!

Thanks in advance, your help will be much appreciated!
:) Sadie

[chris]

able to add multiple images of 1 product
zoom in facility
product variant facility (i.e. buy 5 for xx)
link facility (i.e. buy this , get this half price)
gift vouchers


I'll keep thinking.....

[lajlaj]

Just looking into this at the moment and here are my top 5:-

1) SEO friendly URLs and relevant header tags so that we don't need to manually input them - they are automatically added in the right place!

2) Cart has the ability to grow with me, so it doesn't take forever to add new products and it is possible to manipulate information such as taking a product out of stock without deleting it all together (ie, turning products on and off).

3) Intergration with different payment providers and different payment methods.

4) Ability to add notes to a customer file or order file in the back end.

5) Bulk print and processing of orders.

Design is also very important to me so that it doesn't look template driven.

Hth.

N

[chris]

able to add users / orders on behalf of customers (e.g. telephone orders);
able to add several shipping methods and charges;
able to update customers on their order...e.g. processing, partial order sent, awaiting cheque etc.;

give me time......i'll keep thinking!

[obscure]

This is great - thanks both! Shows that we are working along the right kind of lines, very little that we've not covered.

I was worried about how much your average person knows about SEO and how to push the fact that our cart is very SEO friendly, so if anyone has comments on this that'd be great! Bearing in mind not being able to use google / yahoo etc logos :S

:) Sadie

[Bag Crazy]

How about product variation boxes for different sizes or different colour? I'm not sure what you are selling so don't know if this'll apply to you. You might want an affiliate scheme. Good Luck! Everytime I think I've thought of everything I think of something else. I now have someone working on a new template for the site, he's asked me not to have anymore bright ideas!!!!

[Dino]

Content management to update text/information pages. I find this is becoming more important these days.

[moomum]

stock control!

[Miranda]

Ability to integrate easily with your accounts package so you can export orders, customers etc (eg Sage, Quick Books, or even Excel csv file)