By day Sarah Jane is an assistant in a thriving florist that she runs with her childhood friend. By night she runs her own online business selling handcrafted stationery and other accessories made from dried and pressed flowers. She gets a full eight hours of sleep nightly and if she is not at her laptop overseeing her website, she goes on short trips to unwind. How does she do it?

The answer? Sarah Jane says that her online business and e-Commerce shopping cart software really helped things move along smoothly. Third party integrations are also vital when it comes to ensuring that her business ran without a hitch. “What I do most times when I get home,” she added, “… is to check my email for orders, print out the invoices, pull the inventory and send out the invoice and airway bill via courier. And that’s that!” she said, with a flourish.

More and more online merchants are realizing that online webstore shopping cart software is highly important when it comes to ensuring success for their businesses. Web-savvy merchants will readily oversee the integration process themselves but oftentimes, they will let the shopping cart service handle everything from A to Z. Commendable shopping cart service providers include those who go through certification processes and various integration stages are the ones to look out for because reputation is very important to them, so you’ll know that they are the real deal.

Some shopping cart integrations for online merchants are as follows:

1. Security protection – You want to look out for shopping carts with SSL certificates (Secure Socket Layer) which allows credit card numbers to be encrypted for superior data protection. If you spot websites with an additional ‘s’ to the ‘http’ prefix chances are the site has SSL certificates. Although this feature can cost shopping cart providers several hundred dollars annually but the benefits far outweigh the costs for merchants can process credit card payments with peace of mind while adding sought after credibility to their business.

2. Shipping – Online business owners first prepare essential details about their offerings so that certified shipping providers can use that data to calculate the shipping rate. Automatic rate calculators are an integral part of the certifications, and with these options at hand it means that customers using the shopping cart to shop online can choose the shipping method and rate that fulfill their needs.

3. Shopping search – Merchants who own large product catalogs can save a lot of time without having to manually key in data for each item in their database when they use automatic shopping cart feeds. A good example is GoDaddy’s Quick Shopping Cart whereby Google Product XML feeds are automatically created and sent to Google, giving the merchant greater convenience and total automation for the shopping search features within the business.

4. Bookkeeping/inventory management - Whether merchants choose to use Peachtree, Quickbooks, or any other accounting software of their choice, they should choose a shopping cart software which allows transactions to be imported directly within the accounting software. Having the transactions in sync with the accounting bit of your business will mean greater connectivity, allowing for seamless business operations.

5. Third party payment processing services - If you are using Paypal as a third party payment processing provider, you should ask if the shopping cart you are about to choose will work with Paypal Express or Paypal Pro, as there are differences between these two. Don’t fall for shopping cart providers who merely say they support Paypal – they are being vague and that is why you may need to probe them further for confirmation.

6. Credit card processing - When it come to credit card processing, security should be your main concern. Most shopping cart providers now integrate security certifications to save merchants further time and trouble. Plug-and-play merchant account arrangements are also more popular among providers these days.

7. Analytics - One mistake merchants often do is think that they don’t need analytics software. But time and again it’s been proven that this feature can give you useful insight what sort of customers who are coming to your site, what they need and why they are not buying into your products. A good example is Google Analytics and Omniture that can be integrated to your shopping carts.

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