Since the holiday season is upon us, now is the time to think about your shopping cart…anytime is good for that matter.
It’s relatively easy to optimize a shopping cart – the buyer has already been persuaded as they are well into in the buying stage. You don’t need pages of persuasive content to get them to convert. Shopping carts are often where the low hanging fruit is so a small investment can pay off big.
Shopping cart optimization solutions span a wide-range from really simple to really custom and complex – this post is only intended to outline the pros and cons of 3rd party and custom shopping carts
3rd party shopping carts
Also known as “canned” shopping carts, pros of a third party shopping cart are lower cost, quicker marketing time and the convenience you get from having a shopping cart that comes with all the bells and whistles like payment gateway, fraud protection, SSL encryption and so on.
On the flip side of this, the cons include a lack of control over the look and feel, the user experience, and difficulty in testing and analyzing user data.
Custom shopping carts
They are just that, custom. So one of the pros of course is how a custom shopping cart can more easily integrate with the rest of your site. Also, you can analyze user data more easily, make changes much easier and integrate it with testing tool like Google Website Optimizer much easier than canned shopping carts.
But they do cost more, carry more operational overhead and it’s slower to market custom shopping carts than canned ones.
Which route you choose mainly depends on the financial and IT resources you have at your disposal. Even if you’re currently using one the most restrictive 3rd party shopping cart, you can optimize it and see a worthy return on your investment. Many who initially optimize their 3rd party carts move on to build a custom one in the future to tap into more opportunities.
The moral of this story – don’t think just because you’ve got a generic 3rd party canned shopping cart you can’t optimize it. Especially with the Christmas season fast approaching, the time to optimize is now.