Shopping Cart girl
Ecommerce Shopping Cart Software
8 years ago, if you wanted to create an ecommerce shopping cart solution so that you could take cash from a client online, chances are you or your staff would put up a page or two with your sales letter, a privacy form, contact us and a quicky‘ credit card html form from which you would take the critical credit card information before sending that along to your merchant account provider or bank.
I personally started in this business before most of the major banks in my area of North America even had online credit card processing. These banks made me use the old “credit card not present” method in which we re-entered the credit card information every morning and evening into a modem connected machine that connected to their bank.
Today, the current situation is very different from what happened then.
As of 2007/2008 Visa/MasterCard compliance indicates that as an ecommerce shopping cart solution provider seller or merchant you are no longer allowed to directly query any client for their credit card information online unless your facility is PCI Compliant.
So, how then are ecommerce shopping cart solutions done?
Your ecommerce shopping cart process can still allow users to choose whatever they want from your online catalogue however at checkout, after appropriate shipping and any applicable taxes have been calculated, as a merchant seller, you must pass the user and the shopping details over to a PCI Compliant system that has Visa’s permission to query that user for their credit card information.
Again, as a seller, do not put html forms on your site that ask a user for their credit card information. This is no longer allowed and you will lose your merchant account if a savvy user understands what it is that you, as the seller, are doing and complains about your sellers process.
Don’t waste time fighting with/for PCI Compliance
The best way to get around this is to use a 3rd party service that integrates with your online merchant account.
This might be paypal, 1Shoppingcart, Volusion,Yahoo Stores or MonsterCommerce or a ecommerce shopping cart solution that gets around all these extremely strict PCI problems.
These are all large well established services that run PCI Compliant Facilities that pass VIsa/MasterCard Compliance inspections annually. They easily facilitate your Ecommere shopping cart setup and maintenance issues.
They vary in that some of them have differing levels of difficulty with their interfaces and only one of them actually offers integrated sales funnel capability with the shopping cart. You see most customers don’t buy something even when they want it. Its the reason that 99 visitors might visit your site and you get only one referral that day. The truth is that visitors needs to trust a site and frequently interact with it up to 7 times before actually purchasing. That is the statistic now.
Ecommerce Shopping Cart Sales Funnel
A sales funnel via an autoresponder ensure that you can write one set of information related messages and *talk* to your signed up prospects automatically using an autoresponder. Somewhere in around the 7th message, a large percentage of them will respond positively. This is how one big marketer, Armin Morin claimed to get up to 45% conversion rates while everyone else was doing half a percent. Armin is one of the smartest online marketers out there.
So a sales funnel that integrates with the shoppingcart is key, whether you are selling rollerskates, bathing suits, Music DVD’s or a recipe for your mom’s shortcake. Of the PCI compliant shopping carts tested above only one has the ability to create an automated sales funnel.
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