According to this article by Anne Holand from Marketing Sherpa, a huge 82% of shoppers will not browse your homepage.  No matter how enticing a website may appear, they will head straight for navigational elements such as nav bars and search boxes.

The article presents the results of this study and depicts the majority of shoppers as “male shoppers in the real world”.

“You know how men are… they treat going to most stores as a Prcurement Expedition .  They enter with their shopping goal firmly in mind, glance about quickly to establish which aisle the item is in march down the aisle looking neither right nor left, grab the item in question and then march firmly to checkout and exit”.

In light of the study’s evidence, the article then goes onto say how webmasters can improve navigation, internal site search and a catagory pages’ conversion capability.

Today it has been announced that Google checkout is now available to all UK merchants and shoppers.

Google checkout is a checkout process that allows online merchants to process transactions online. The checkout enables customers to buy from online shops with Google Checkout integrated, quickly and securely.

If UK customers and merchants take advantage of Google Checkout as much as the US market have it’s sure to go down well!

BBC News reports Google will also offer £10 of free processing for every £1 spend on AdWords advertising!

When Internet shopping carts did not exist, an online customer would be able to to add just one product to their shopping cart at any one time, and checkout.  It was not possible to add multiple products to a shopping basket.  If ecommerce was to become the future, it was clear that merchants would have to provide a quicker and much more convenient service for customers.

Internet shopping carts has enabled ecommerce to become as big as it is today.  For a business to stay competative, it is no longer enough to have a website that merely displays what the highstreet shop sells, it seems that it must have a shopping basket where by customers can purchase directly from their computer.

Today shopping carts give customers a host of advantages:

1)  It allows customers to add as many products to their virtual shopping basket as they wish.

2)  View and delete individual products.

3)  Software today even allows shoppers to track their order all the way to their doorstep.

5)  Internet shopping carts with an integrated help desk support system provides shoppers with a form of customer support.  Shoppers can feel secure and happy that any potential problems will be resolved.

6)  Forums can become a widely used feature of a website so shopping cart software with integrated forums are especially handy features, this is more so the case if online retailers sell equipment users may need product support for.

Shopping cart software also gives merchants a host of advantages:

7)  Internet shopping carts with an integrated web content management system allows merchants to customise the content and design of their online ecommerce shopping cart and store.

8)  Web content management systems today often come with integrated search engine friendly features, providing merchants with the potential to rank well in the search engines for their desired key terms.

Above I have listed just 8 features available to merchants today.

Viart Shop has many more features, on top of those mentioned above, and continues to grow in functionality as the ecommerce industry develops.

About the Author

Viart (http://www.viart.com/) provide PHP shopping cart software worldwide.

The company are currently providing a fully hosted 30-day trial of their PHP Internet shopping carts