Tips for Choosing Your Shopping Cart Software

In this week’s automatemysmallbusiness.com podcast, Matt and Brandon discuss various web technologies like shopping carts and content management systems and briefly explain SEO (search engine optimization) and how it works. They discuss the difference between various shopping carts and which works best for them and more importantly why it works best, How to set-up your own shopping cart for you to use in your own online e-commerce business venture that suits YOU best.

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Links from the Show:

• Volusion
• Yahoo Shopping Cart
• PayPal
• Google Checkout
• Amazon Merchant Services
• Overstock
• WordPress
• Drupal
• Joomla
• Interspire
• Big Commerce (hosted Interspire)
• Ubercart
• WP-E-Commerce
• Shopp

Transcript:

Welcome to Automate My Small Business where we show you how to set up and run your own automated business on the cheap. So get ready to take back your life and add a little spice. It’s time to build something automated.

BRANDON: Hi there. This is Brandon.

MATT: And I’m Matt.

BRANDON: And this is episode 2 and we’re going to talk a little about shopping carts. One of the main areas that you really can get the most thing out of your buck, at least in terms of automation is the trustee shopping cart and it’s probably the epitome of being able to run a business without any effort whatsoever. And I think we got a good show for you coming up. And we think you might get a lot out of it. So Matt, what do you have in mind just in general for shopping carts? What’s your feeling?

MATT: Well, I’m really excited to talk about shopping carts because, I mean, that’s really our 24 hours a day, 7 days a week automated sales person.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: I know we know both tried a couple of different shopping carts as we’ve been building up some of our businesses and there’s a lot of different features that are in these to look for. So what are some of the features that you feel the most important things to look for in a shopping cart.

BRANDON: Well, you know, I’ll tell you what. You know, I’ve had some experiences with a number of shopping carts. I started off right away with Yahoo shopping cart which I ended up turning away from after I saw some of its limitations and it made me appreciate certain features that a kind of a higher end shopping cart would offer. You know, it made me appreciate things like SEO friendly URLs and you know the ability to run reports and things like that.

MATT: Before we get too far past that, you want to explain what SEO is?

BRANDON: Yeah. SEO stands for search engine optimization and when I first got started, I didn’t realize how important that was and really it is the keystone to driving traffic to your site. And really what it is is being able to optimize your site and maybe even links to the site that allow search engines like Google and Yahoo and being to know what your site is all about. So that if somebody searches certain keywords, they know that this site is the place to go and you know, you’ll be able to be at the top of the, let’s say, the first page. Or, you know, you want to be get to be on the first page of any search results. And so when you can change the URL, for example, in the shopping cart so that the URL is keyword specific to whatever you’re trying to sell, that has a lot of weight in Google and other search engines to take those keywords and drive traffic to the site based on those keywords. So that’s a big deal and some shopping carts don’t offer that. Fortunately, the one I’m using now– I’m using Volusion at the moment, they do offer that. And there’s a few others that do as well.

MATT: And one clarification I want to make is that, you know, SEO is really about driving free traffic to your site.

BRANDON: Absolutely.

MATT: Having bad URLs won’t stop you from paying to get people to your site using adwords.

BRANDON: Right. And so that’s probably worth noting for those who are just getting started on this, you know, the difference between organic results and paid results or what sometimes they call PPC, pay per click. Basically, that Google, if you’ll take that as an example has two or three links at the top of their results and then all the links along at the right hand side is all paid links and then the rest of those links that you normally see below that for page after page are organic links. If you can get into those organic results that mean that you’re driving traffic to your site free. No cost to you or to anybody associated with that site. So you’re able to get free marketing by just optimizing your site and allowing Google or other search engines to know real easily what your site is about, you know, keyword friendly, meta tags used to be a lot more important than it is now but that’s a good way of understanding it.

MATT: It’s not important at all.

BRANDON: Yeah. Well, there’s a big debate about that. But yeah that seems to be the way it is now is that meta tags don’t really make much of an impact on SEO any longer but you get the idea.

MATT: So following along that same thing, one of my biggest features is a good content management system. And what a good content management system lets you do is let you as a fairly non technical person adds content and information about your products and about your whole company to your website very easily in a way that Google can easily read it and search it and index it. So for me, a good content management system is essential to the other, you know, not just your product information but any articles you might want to write about your product especially when you’re selling just a few products on your site, I feel that you want to have a lot of articles. You want to kind of merge what people traditionally think of as a blog in a website. I like to have a lot of articles on my shopping cart site and so I feel like a good content management system lets me do that.

BRANDON: Matt, tell me how you use a content management system and what that looks like?

MATT: There’s a couple pretty popular content management systems out there. One of them is WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, some of the open source ones that have gained a lot of popularity. I personally would like to use WordPress and basically there’s two sites that, website: there’s what the visitor would see and there’s the administration site. So as the owner of that website, I can log in. I can, say, I want to post a new article and it gives me kind of go over a text box, almost like word where I can just type in and do the spell checking. I can bold and put bullets and all kinds of stuff and then just press post and it will show up on my site. And I didn’t need to know any HTML to code that, I can have lots of plug ins to have it or make sure all my links are set up right and it’s SEO friendly and things like that.

BRANDON: So have you been able to find a shopping cart that actually works directly with WordPress?

MATT: There’s a couple of shopping carts that plug in to content management systems. For WordPress, there’s one called wp-e-commerce which is kind of a default standard. There’s another one called Shopp which is out there and then for Drupal, there’s one called Ubercart which has a pretty good developer following under it.

BRANDON: Hmm. So there, you got lots of options. And I bet you probably agree with this that there’s probably not the perfect shopping cart out there that has everything you need, would you agree?

MATT: Depends on what you doing. But the perfect shopping cart is going to be different for every person.

BRANDON: Yeah, that’s kind of where I was going with that, you know. If we recommend one or two shopping carts on this episode, you know, that may or may not be the exact fit for you out there, you know, starting out something real simple if it’s all featured and vice versa, you know. I have a friend of mine who wants to start collecting payments and donations for a charity she’s doing, and you know, she has a lemonade stand that she does on the weekends that collects money for Cancer children and she doesn’t know much about putting up websites at all. And her immediate reaction was okay I’ll get set up with GoDaddy and get a domain and then first thing you see after getting a domain is GoDaddy shopping cart. Well, you know, I haven’t personally used GoDaddy shopping cart so I’m not going to be able to say a big credit on it, know exactly what it does or doesn’t do but I’m going to guess that’s it’s not full featured and may be a good fit for her. So if she just wants to take donations or take credit cards that might be a good fit. Do you have any feedback or know of any features that the GoDaddy shopping cart may or may not have?

MATT: I’m not sure about the GoDaddy shopping cart but here requirements kind of fall into a category I call microsites. So some of the shopping carts that I think are the best for those are just simple Paypal Buy Now buttons or Google Checkout buttons, I mean, you don’t need a full featured site for that or shopping cart for that. You can just, you know, add a little bit of snippet of HTML onto normal site that you get from Paypal and suddenly you can take payment.

BRANDON: Okay, so let’s talk about. So let’s go ahead and say that WordPress is probably one of the easiest ways to make a website especially one that you can continually add to and make something of a long term investment and still be like you’re getting a lot out of it. And if that was your hosted site solution and you wanted to go ahead and put a buy button on there, all you really need to do is sign up at Paypal and get their merchant account and be able to snip some of their code, their HTML code. I guess there would be a script of some sort and place it …

MATT: You got to be able to copy and paste basically.

BRANDON: Right. And so there you go then you have your pretty much a very inexpensive, very low maintenance form of being able to take credit card or donations of any sort. Really, I mean, anything Paypal offers which by the way Paypal will take Paypal payments from, you know, if you have a Paypal account but if you didn’t, they also take credit cards so it’s an easy way to get on merchant account and accept credit cards without having to apply with the bank to get a merchant account and so on and so forth.

MATT: Now the downside of those solutions is that, you know, it’s very restrictive. It doesn’t have very many features so it’s only going to work for, you know, the most basic shopping carts. And if you have a lot of products you’re going to, you know, grow out of that really fast.

BRANDON: Well, that’s a good point. Okay, so she doesn’t have a product in this case so she is just wanting to take a credit card or take donations so that would be a perfect for her. But if you have products and you’re going to be selling products online, you do want to kind of have a shopping cart that they can add the product to and go through the process of shipping and a lot of the other features that a shopping cart has, right?

MATT: Exactly.

BRANDON: Alright. So let’s talk about that. So what’s the bare bond definition of shopping cart? What you’re getting?

MATT: At the core of it, you need to be able to accept payments, track orders around those payments, so you know, what products did someone buy as part of that order. We talked a little earlier about content management systems so being able to add content product management, so being able to add information about your product, track inventory. Some of them are full featured, ones will have customer relationship management systems built into them so being able to track your communication with the customer, integration with email to send, emails that your orders have been accepted and shipped and status updates; an affiliate system to track any referrals that you might get from other people and the ability to pay those people for referring business to you.

BRANDON: And eventually you’re going to want to ship this product unless it’s a software product and they can download it.

MATT: Right. So shipping integration.

BRANDON: Shipping integration is critical. Eventually if you outsource your fulfillment to another company, they are going to want to be able to download in bulk your orders. And you know a lot of them might use UPS world ship which is the free software that UPS gives all of their large shipping clients. And you pretty much can dump the data from your shopping cart into the world ship in it and makes labels instantly and so there’s some back end issues that would really make life easier if you knew ahead of time that it can do those things so that’s good to look out for.

MATT: Exactly. So I think you’re kind of seeing that there’s a lot of integration points.

BRANDON: Yeah. What about quickbooks? What about using it to download all your transactions? I know, Matt, you’re a big user of quickbooks and wanting to integrate everything so that your bookkeeper can work with that easily. Tell us your experience in that.

MATT: Oh if it was only so easy. Yeah, integrating with quickbooks is a really nice feature and fortunately a lot of shopping carts just aren’t very good at it.

BRANDON: So what did you do? What did you end up doing? I mean tell us your experience; I know you had gone through some pains early on. What were the issues you have to solve and how did you end up solving them?

MATT: So one of the big distinctions I have is that I’m using quickbooks online instead of plain old quickbooks. And so while there’s a few shopping carts that will integrate quickbooks and allow you to download transactions, most of those don’t integrate with quickbooks online. So I am yet to find a good integration with quickbooks online. So I basically just have to dump my transactions out to some excel file or something else and let my bookkeeper enter these in which is unfortunate.

BRANDON: Yeah. Okay. And that’s the approach you choose to take. The other approach you can take is similar to what I do and that is I don’t worry about the details and I basically let the sales numbers be the amount that is deposited in my checking account on daily basis. So I do not download the data from my shopping cart and avoid that whole dilemma altogether. And I tell my bookkeeper that my sales numbers are the deposit amounts that come in to the checking account every month. And there might be some differences in how that might look in your books but in the ends, it’s all really the same. Bottom line is for tax purposes it’s the same really. Because your taxable income is after you take your expenses from your sales numbers and if there’s two and a half percent in the cost to the credit card company and maybe in the case where I was using Yahoo shopping cart, they took one and a half percent of any sales transaction. So everybody gets their low slither off of that and in the end whatever is dumped in to the checking account is whatever is left over. And for tax reasons that’s actually the same as what you are doing, Matt, except you get more detail.

MATT: Yeah. I’m not doing it so much for tax reasons as I don’t want to see the details of my business and where the money is going and be able to manage it at a more detailed level.

BRANDON: Right. So that’s a good transition to next item is reports, right? Your shopping cart should have some great reports.

MATT: Absolutely.

BRANDON: And I can tell you that although Yahoo shopping cart was very mediocre in a lot of areas, its reports was fantastic. And it made some good looking graphs, you got to see what your best product was, how often they were ordered and what the average was over time. It even gave you an average line on the graphs so that you could kind of get an idea even though your orders might go up and down, you know, drastically every day, but you’re kind of getting a smooth line over time to kind of see what your trend is. That was really nice to be able to see with Yahoo shopping cart. I kind of miss that now that I have Volusion.

MATT: Yeah. There are opportune is not nearly as good as the Yahoo ones or…

BRANDON: Yeah. So what other features are you looking for in a shopping cart?

MATT: Another critical thing is good support. So invariably something is going to go wrong in your store and you’re going to need to call someone and tell them, hey I need some help. I need to get something fixed. Try calling the support numbers of whoever you’re going to use before you light it.

BRANDON: Yeah, you know one of the things I like about Yahoo is I could call one number and they’d picked up every time. That was pretty impressive. And I have to say Volusion was pretty good too. They’re good on their chat also. You can always chat with them. Maybe five or ten minutes you may end up waiting but that’s about as long as it would be.

MATT: In line with that, reliability is a big deal but that’s something that’s hard to research up front.

BRANDON: Right. So integration is a big issue, right? I mean, so Paypal and Google Checkout are things that you may not realize you want right up front but if you’re going to be accepting credit cards and you are not able to offer Paypal or Google Checkout, that’s going to be an edge that you would want to have. Matt, tell us why you think Google Checkout is good to have.

MATT: I really like Google Checkout because one of the things that you get as part of Google Checkout is they’ll put a little badge next to your name in the search results that says, you know, your website takes Google Checkout. And anything you can get on that search results page that draws attention to your site is a very, very good thing. You know, that has potential to drive a lot more people to your site.

BRANDON: Yeah. Paypal doesn’t have anything like that, do they?

MATT: Paypal doesn’t have that.

BRANDON: They call that a badge, right?

MATT: Exactly.

BRANDON: Google Checkout badge.

MATT: The thing that I really like about Paypal is that unlike some of the other payment gateways that they’ll abstract a lot of the charges away from you. So like when you’re using an all payment gateway, you may have to pay a little bit more if someone uses a, you know, south west rewards card because guess what the merchant pays for that south west rewards, not the issuer of that credit card, no one else. You accept those cards that issue rewards, you are paying for those rewards and Paypal charge a little bit higher rate but they charge the same rate for all credit cards so that’s kind of a nice feature.

BRANDON: Yeah. That was a little bit of a surprise when I got my statement and noticed that I was paying a little bit more. In some cases, quite a bit more for certain cards that seemed to be called premier card and I had no idea what that was or why until you mentioned that to me one time. I didn’t realize that the world cards are all these, you know, high level premier cards were charging more.

MATT: You know, there’s a lot of things that the merchants get charge for. You know, for instance, if someone decides to not pay for something, they call their credit card company and say, hey, I want you to take this off of my statement. Well not only does the merchant got charge back for that transaction, they also get a fine for that. Also the merchant is responsible for any fraud, right? So if someone orders a product through your website with a fake or stolen credit card and you ship out your product to them, well, the credit card company is going to take that money back and you’re going to be out of a product as you shipped it out. So with payment gateways, you know, they all kind of seem the same but you really want to find one that has really good fraud protection because that will all make a big difference for you.

BRANDON: Okay. So in general, what we’re looking at is you go to these websites, you sign up, right? You sometimes pay a set up fee, sometimes not, and that set up fee might be anywhere from 0 to $150. In some cases, there are some transaction fees. I know Yahoo charge the one to one and a half percent of the sales which can add up and then there’s a monthly fee typically. And that’s pretty much the same across the board for all your hosted shopping carts. And that brings up another point as there are such things as non hosted shopping carts, ones that you actually download, you install on your server or you upload it to a server you own or you’re hosting with—your hosting company. But you own that software. For example, Interspire is one where I think it cost about, I’d say, $500 or $600. You pay that all up front. You buy it. You own it. You never have to pay them a cent afterwards. And that’s an interesting way to go if you’re pretty sure that’s what you want.

MATT: Yeah, I mean, that kind of bring up the difference between hosted shopping carts, self hosted so basically buying a product and writing that on your own web server and then one of the other ones that I think a lot of people don’t’ consider is a shopping cart that’s integrated with the big reseller like Amazon or Uberstop.

BRANDON: Are you talking about say the Amazon store that you can set up? Is that what you’re talking about?

MATT: That’s one thing but you can also if you just have a couple of products or even if you have lots of products, you can just sell them directly on Amazon, you know. Amazon is not the only company that sells product on Amazon. If you notice when you’re shopping around the Amazon, there’s a lot of you know these products sold by somebody else. Well, you can register as a merchant on Amazon and sell your stuff on there too. And use the giant Amazon system as your shopping cart.

BRANDON: So in other words, you don’t even need a website. You just go ahead and start reselling your whatever product you have right on Amazon, is that what you’re saying?

MATT: Exactly. Of course, Amazon doesn’t do this out of the kindness of their heart. They take a pretty good fee for that.

BRANDON: So could you do the same thing where you have a website and you sell those products but you direct them to the Amazon store for the whole process and shopping cart and check out to occur on Amazon.

MATT: You can also do that. So Amazon, Paypal and Google Checkout are all kind of models where you can have the shopping cart on your site and then direct them somewhere else to pay for that.

BRANDON: And ebay too. There are a lot of that in there.

MATT: Of course, ebay owns Paypal so …

BRANDON: That’s true.

MATT: It’d be absolutely right that you know, Amazon overstock and ebay are good examples of market places that you can sell your products on.

BRANDON: Yeah, I mean supposedly there’s millions of millionaires that come out of ebay selling god-knows-what but there’s a good business model there I’ve never used it or done it or seen it or even known anybody to do it. But I know there’s plenty of case studies that have turned out some millionaires from ebay. Actually I take that back, I did know one person who actually went to Louis Vuitton stores and even though they give you a one item limit at least on certain bags and stuff, they went to this Louis Vuitton stores and this was back early when internet was just getting started and so it wasn’t as common then. They would go to Louis Vuitton stores, buy as much merchandise as they could and then they’d go and you know sell it on ebay for twice or three times as much. And you’d think, whoa why wouldn’t they just buy directly from Louis Vuitton. It turns out they must have heard buyers, say Japanese, where in some cases, there weren’t any Louis Vuitton stores and that was at the time when I don’t think that even Louis Vuitton was selling online. So you can find something that isn’t sold online already and trust me, there’s plenty of them. There’s lots of products. You go through any sort of gift shop or anything that you might find to the boutique store and they just don’t sell them online. And sometimes you can pick out a product, look at who makes it, get in agreement with the supplier and you’re the first one that sells it online at, you kno, ebay or Amazon is a great way to do it. You know, you’d be surprised, there’s a lot of opportunities like that.

MATT: That’s really interesting story.

BRANDON: Yeah. It’s a good way to go if you don’t really have any business knowledge, you know, you just want to get out there and start something.

MATT: Okay. So kind of moving back around to the different types of sites, you know, we’ve run through a lot of things. And I want to kind of bring up some different classifications of how I group some of these shopping carts because you go out and search your shopping carts on Google, you’re going to find hundreds and hundreds of shopping carts. It’s kind of hard to make sense of all these. So we talked about the microsites, so things like the Paypal buy now buttons, and Google Checkout. We’ve mentioned some of the sites that I kind of glommed into something called do-it-all so I think Volusion is one of those, Magento, your Interspire, so things that try to make all the different components not just the shopping cart but the other systems that you usually integrate. Things like the content management system, and the affiliate system, and autoresponder and all those richer things. And try to provide all those for you at once. The next classification idea is the open and modular systems. So you can kind of think of this as you know that old stereo you had or you had the stereo receiver and the cd and all the stuff in separate modules. You went out and bought the best one of each of those. You can kind of build the best agreed thing with just kind of different modules, so a shopping cart module and a separate content manager module, and a separate CRM module. You can really get the best of retesting doing this but you have to do a lot research to see how everything is going to integrate and that it will integrate. The last one is the market places that we talked about with the Amazon and the Overstock and Ebay. You have any other classifications of things that you might throw out there, Brandon.

BRANDON: No, I think that pretty much covers it. I think we were really able to tell anybody who’s interested trying to start this from the very beginning, how does one go about making, you know, a website with the shopping cart. Although it would be nice to say that all the shopping carts can be done on your own. You might need some help the more complex it gets and if you don’t use help and you want to just bare bounds it, the one thing you really want to make sure you look for is the ability for templates or the templates to be available so that you don’t have to design the site yourself. You literally are just putting up product descriptions, uploading a few pictures, maybe a logo, filling out the shipping or requirement maybe the return policy and some of your contact information. And you pretty much can go right from zero to sixty and a couple of days if you just want to take that approach. Now the more you want to get real fancy and have a fantastic site, you might need some help, you know, with the web designer. There’s plenty of them out there. oDesk is a great place to find them.

MATT: Yeah. So you brought up template which is a really, you know, important thing. And templates, you’re going to find those around some of the shopping carts that are really popular or the ones that are built on, you know, really popular content management systems. So we both used Volusion and Volusion has, you know, a couple of built in templates. But if you go search on the web, there’s very few third party templates out there for Volusion whereas if you go search for WordPress templates or Drupal templates, there are thousands and thousands of them.

BRANDON: And some really good looking ones too.

MATT: Some of the amazing one you can get for free. So an active developer community around whatever platform you are doing as well as a really popular product, it’s going to increase your chances of finding out of the box templates to use.

BRANDON: Yeah, I think from the very beginning that’s what you’re going to be using, you know, you’re going to want to feel like this is easy for you to update or manage yourself, you know. If there’s one piece of advice I’m going to give to anybody doing this is learn enough for yourself. Learn enough so that you can make modifications at least to certain content or if you want to change your price, you can be able to do that. If you hand that all out to somebody like web designer and the only person who knows to modify your site is them, you are dramatically handicapped. The creativity is not going to flow. There’s going to be times where you just say, oh you know I want to put a sale up or the price is wrong. I messed up the—I want to change my return policy like on the whim, you know. You can’t expect that you’re going to send an email to the guy or girl who’s doing your website and they’re going to take a few days until they get around to doing it and you know the work flow just comes to a screeching halt and you end up relying too heavily on people like that helping you put the website. I really feel that’s a critical element of owning and running your own business as being able to have enough knowledge to update the website and the content of it when and where you want it and how you want it. You’ll never ever get the look and feel that exactly you want by explaining it through an email or even or the phone. It just never comes out exact. So if you have any ability to be able to update that information on your own, it’s really going to be a big advantage.

MATT: And the good news is that a good shopping cart and a good content management system is going to make that pretty easy to do.

BRANDON: Right. Yeah. I think that with the good shopping cart and a template and a few text field that you need to fill in, you’re pretty much ready to go.

MATT: So stylistically, I mean, what are some of the things you look for just beyond the template like what kind of feel are you looking for from the usability of the shopping cart?

BRANDON: Well, you know, it’s interesting there are different ways you can add content to these different shopping carts. I know how—when Yahoo, when I wanted to update or upload HTML, let say, you know, if you want to type out HTML just using text and you know how to do that, that’s easy to do on almost any shopping cart. But if you don’t want to type out the text with all the tags so and so forth, you can easily use a HTML writer or editor which Frontpage made by Microsoft …

MATT: Yeah, now. Its Expression Web and Frontpage wasn’t so good.

BRANDON: It wasn’t so good, yeah, but Expression Web though I hear is great. I haven’t used it because I’m a Dreamweaver person but I used Dreamweaver to, you know, dump any HTML that is on the shopping cart already. I put it in Dreamweaver. I modify it and I can drag and drop. I can put images in there and then I can export or not, really even export, all I want to do is really copy the HTML that’s now in Dreamweaver and drop it back to my Volusion cart user interface. And that works pretty well. I wish it was more integrated and I think there are solutions out there that are more integrated as so much as to you are really working in Dreamweaver from beginning to end and there is very little UI on the web. There might be that in addition to but I think there are solutions that work directly with Dreamweaver or Expression web.

MATT: Right. I tell you one of the things that I really look for as a feature of the UI of the shopping cart is a one page check out. So I really don’t like the shopping cart where you have to click through maybe five or six different pages on the wizard to get through, you know, and give me your money. I want to make it as easy as possible for that user to give me some money so I always look for a one page check out. What do you think about those, Brandon?

BRANDON: Yeah, I think you’re right. It is easier and more user friendly for a one page check out. There is something to be said about, you know, teasing the customer with the pair all you need to do is give me your name and then they click continue and then the next pages, now just give me your address. And then by the time they’re actually having to put on their credit card information, even though they didn’t want to buy, or from the beginning maybe they think, well now that I’m already this far, I might as well finish the order.

MATT: See usually I get about three pages that I get on, I get, how much longer is this going to be? I want to go buy from somewhere else.

BRANDON: Yeah. I mean, who wants to run a business where you’re actually having to con a person to buy your product. That’s probably not the business of choice to have. But that aside, yeah, you’re right. I think the one page check out is the way to go and Volusion does that.

MATT: The other thing I really like is check out without the membership or without signing up for an account. It drives me crazy when I have to go to site that I’m just going to buy one thing from. I’m probably never going to go back to and they make me sign up for an account and verify my email address. I was like, man, I just want to give you my credit card number and buy. Why you making it so hard?

BRANDON: Yeah, I actually thought that was the case with Volusion but it turns out you can sign up anonymously as well so—I’m glad about that. You don’t have to give your email address …

MATT: I don’t mind giving my email address but I just don’t want to have to create a user account.

BRANDON: Or like with a password, right?

MATT: Exactly.

BRANDON: You don’t want to have to come up with a password and then verify your email address and things of that sort, right?

MATT: Exactly. So what are some other features that you look for?

BRANDON: Well other than the ones we talked about, I think the ability to take in phone orders. It turned out to be helpful because even as much as I’d like to say I don’t take phone orders which I made a policy, I don’t take phone orders. I simply say if the customer calls and they say, oh I’d like to order this. I simply say, look, you know, our policy is we don’t take phone orders. They usually are kind of curious why I don’t and after I tell them you know it’s just going to get to you much faster if you put it on the web; that order goes directly to the warehouse and the warehouse ships it immediately whereas if I were to take your phone order, you know, I have to put it in the queue to get to you and all that. As much as that may or may not be true, they get the idea and they’re happy to go to the web.

MATT: Yeah, even if your shopping cart doesn’t allow you a special way to put in phone orders, you can always just go to your website and act like you’re the user and type in the fields that they tell you on the phone and use your website to place the order for them.

BRANDON: True. You could always do that. The only issue with that on some cases is that if you’re using the same computer to do that over and over, it turns out that you need to clear your cookies on a regular basis and that can get annoying

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: to do that over and over because it thinks you’re the same customer ordering all these different products because you’re using the same computer and you’re on the same IP address and son and so forth. So the phone orders feature eliminates that issue.

MATT: And also if your shopping cart doesn’t support phone orders sometimes your payment gateway will.

BRANDON: Like Paypal or …

MATT: authorize.net or one of those guys, yeah.

BRANDON: Right. The other—the last issue I’d say is important to me is the ability to work and rework the refunds or the credits, or the debits, you know. There will always be times where customer makes mistake. They push the buy button and they call up or they email you and say I bought to, when I really want to buy one, or you know, can I change my shipping …

MATT: Or I bought one when I really want to buy ten?

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: I wish they called more and said that.

BRANDON: Yeah, exactly. But you know there’s always going to be these times and if you don’t have an easy way to adjust their amount they owe or you know credit or debit right on their credit card, it really becomes a pain in the ass to have to ask for their credit card again. I know in Volusion I’m able to keep the credit card information on file for as long as I’d like. I know that’s probably not the best policy because you are responsible for the data and the keeping of the credit card numbers and if that gets out of your control, you are liable as a merchant. So beware of that kind of stuff but if you do keep it in the system you are able to take credit, take debits back and forth as many times as you’d like.

MATT: I think one of the big features that you get by keeping that information around is the recurring payments. Right. So if you have something that you might have a subscription for it and you ship out every month to the customer, you want to keep that information. I know that Paypal has recurring payment feature as well.

BRANDON: Yeah. Recurring billing, recurring ordering, I think that’s important especially if you have a monthly subscription or a membership that you signed or download that you take monthly payments for.

MATT: Or just a beer of the month club.

BRANDON: Yeah, I mean, it’s a fantastic feature to have. When we talk about automated business model, right? You’ve got a monthly amount coming in from every customer forever in some cases. Those are great business models. The ability to take affiliates built directly into the shopping cart I think is important.

MATT: See I actually don’t like it built directly into the shopping cart. There’s a lot of really good affiliate systems out there. I’d rather just have my shopping cart. Be able to integrate with those third party affiliate systems.

BRANDON: The third party affiliates such as…

MATT: AMember and some of those things out there. There’s some other affiliate management systems I can’t remember some of their names right now but those are some of the things I’d like. I’m kind of the best of the breed guy and I know you’re like I want one shopping cart that does it all.

BRANDON: Yeah I guess there’s both sides of the coin there. The way I use it is the affiliate links are each unique to every affiliate. When they put that link out there, it goes directly to the website. Is that also how yours work?

MATT: Yeah, that’s also how mine works. There’s also integrating your shopping cart out into some of the big affiliate systems like Comission Junction and things like that.

BRANDON: I do kind of a high breed of affiliate and affiliate links and coupon codes. Most shopping carts out there offer the ability to put coupon codes into the shopping cart so that somebody with a coupon can enter that in at check out page and get a certain amount off or certain percentages off and I use that mainly for offline marketing tracking, you know. Let’s say, I ran an ad in the magazine, you know. How am I suppose to know that 60 percent of the people who saw that ad came to the website and bought. God, that’ll be great, right? If sixty percent actually came and bought something but it’s going to be more like one percent. I think that’s about the average out there.

MATT: I think it’s really important to kind of set your expectations. Remember when I looked and I saw, now two percent, I went, oh my god, only two percent are buying.

BRANDON: Yeah. I mean, one or two percent is good.

MATT: Yeah, after talking to those people, oh that’s really good.

BRANDON: Yeah. Anything above one, one half percent is great. But I use the coupon codes for offline marketing tracking and I use the affiliate links as online marketing tracking so if I have an affiliate who is going out, talking it up, saying hey this is a great product, you ought to go buy or here is a brochure, I’ll leave it with you. And on the back, there might be a coupon code and you know you might get $15 off or $5 off whatever it is. And that person goes to the website and thinks well, what the hell, I put this coupon code in. I get $5 off, I might as well use it. Well now I mean not only getting that person to the website and you know they’re purchasing maybe because they’re getting a little bit off as like you would a coupon at any store but I’m now able to track their purchase pattern you know or that the fact that they’re actually purchasing and where that lead came from without them having to tell me or without me having to bother them with a survey at check out you know.

MATT: Yeah, that’s really good.

BRANDON: So it offers a way to for you track with online and offline buy using the affiliate links and the coupon codes. That’s how I end up using it.

MATT: That sounds good. So I guess on another that we haven’t talked about yet is open source versus commercial licensing. You have any opinions on those?

BRANDON: You know, I don’t know enough about it. I know you have lot of information ideas about it. Why don’t you go ahead and tell us about it.

MATT: You know, on the surface side of it really I don’t care if it’s commercial or it’s open source. But one of the things I’ve noticed from a lot of the open source carts is that they tend to have more active developer communities. And those more active developer communities are going to result to more plug-ins, integration with more payment gateways, lots of extra feature that you might not be able to get by just depending on a commercial software vendor.

BRANDON: So by not having an open source or a—at least an open architecture for you to be able to add additional features that may or may not come with the one package solution, unless it’s open source, there’s no real way to expand it and add plug ins or some things like that, is that what you’re saying?

MATT: That’s kind of—it’s not necessarily cut and dries that, I mean, there are commercial software vendors who provide a nice open API that allow their parties to integrate into them but they’re fewer in the commercial world than there are in the open source world. And on the flip side of that, there’s also open source companies which charge for their product and so they’re kind of a cross breed of open source and commercial.

BRANDON: So we’re talking pretty advance features, I mean, if you’re trying to make some plug ins to make the software do something that it wasn’t necessarily designed to do, it’s usually because you’re pushing the envelope. Is that typical?

MATT: I don’t think that’s necessarily true. For instance, if I’m, say, in New Zealand and I want to use the shopping cart, well, I’m going to need a shopping cart that integrates with the New Zealand payment gateway and a lot of them are probably not going to do that out of the box. So if I use a shopping cart that has an open architecture that people have built plug ins for that for the different payment gateways, you know, I might find one that has a payment gateway in New Zealand.

BRANDON: And so other than being in different countries, what about different features?

MATT: Additional SEO features, maybe integration with third party products like you know we talked about quickbooks earlier, integration with some more advance order management systems. So in most shopping carts, the order management system is part of the shopping cart but as you get bigger you might start selling your product through different channels. You may have multiple websites. You may sell your product on your website, via phone order, via Amazon and Overstock and eBay and you want to have an order management system that centralizes added in any one of those shopping carts or places that you sell thing. So eventually you start decomposing these things and having a separate order management system; so some of the shopping carts have the ability to integrate into those. I like that I can find features that you know maybe I wish the shopping cart work a different way, and when there’s a good API there’s usually someone else out there that wants to do the same thing as me and they’ve already done it so I just download it for free.

BRANDON: So is this all too daunting for the typical person to undertake or do you think this is something that anybody with a little bit of time wanting to learn how to do this?

MATT: I think there’s definitely some shopping carts that make it very, very easy to get started and obviously this can get super complex the bigger you get. If you become like a you know like a bestbuy.com or you know an Amazon on your own, well, you know there’s a lot of complex features that you have to integrate with a lot of complex systems but you know if you’re just selling a couple of products Volusion was really easy just to sign up and they took care of setting up my merchant account and setting up my payment gateway and you know they have the order management system and they have all the marketing stuffs so like creating coupons, all the stuff built in. And so it’s really easy to set up on Volusion. But as you get bigger, there’s—you’re going to find things that you don’t like about those all in one things and so you want to find come of best of breed things I think.

BRANDON: Alright. So I’m going to force you, what’s your pick, your shopping cart pick, best of the best, what you think?

MATT: I’m actually looking for a new shopping cart to move off of Volusion right now. And so I’ve done some research around this and my big features that I’m looking for are best of breed content management system and I want to be able to integrate with Shipwire and a good developer community.

BRANDON: Okay, so you’re pushing the envelope. You want the full featured, best of the best. You want all the bells and whistles and you want the ability to add more bells and whistles from best of breed solutions out there to be able to integrate with it.

MATT: Yeah, I really want a modular solution so I want a shopping cart that is just a shopping cart. It’s not trying to be everything. I just want it to be really good at what it does and I want the ability to plug in more things. So right now I’m kind of leaning towards Ubercart which is a plug in to the Drupal content management system.

BRANDON: Ubercart. Is that right?

MATT: But I haven’t fully committed yet so I’m still looking around. But that’s the one I like right now. WP-E-commerce on top of WordPress is also very interesting to me. I think wordpress is just an awesome software product so …

BRANDON: Yeah, talk about the best of the breed.

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: That’s a great one.

MATT: What about you?

BRANDON: I like the hosted solution. I like the all in one. I don’t have to go and plug in a bunch of other features by going to different sites which is completely opposite of you and you know it’s a different type of way to go about it. So it’s a good example of that there’s no right way to do it. It’s what works best for you. And I like being able to host the site on a hosted solution so I don’t have to worry about my downtime or if my server goes down. I don’t need to be maintaining that. Although if I did get off of a hosted solution, I’m really impressed with Interspire. I think it looks like a pretty solid solution so those are my picks. Yahoo is good in its own way but I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody. It’s just too much of a head ache and I think they charge too much.

MATT: They don’t seem like they charge a lot but when they start taking that percentage of every order and you start getting a lot of orders …

BRANDON: Yeah, I guess it’s good for the beginner but then it doesn’t grow old with you in that case.

MATT: Well, that brings up an interesting point as you actually have to move shopping carts, can you talk about some of the challenges …

BRANDON: It’s pretty much a start over. It’s a complete redo of the entire business. And I have to admit I was also doing some other changes along with it like I was redesigning the product, you know. I was even thinking about changing my virtual phone number and a bunch of other things. But when you decide you need to change one shopping cart to another, it’s not easy. I mean it is easy because it’s the same as if you were to start over. Other than that being able to copy the text from one site to the other, you know, that’s a pretty much an import and export.

MATT: What about all that order history? Were you able to move that?

BRANDON: Never. Never was I able to get that over now. No. So if I ever need to look at an order past August 1st, I have to go back into my old Yahoo store. Fortunately, I still have access to that so that’s important to have by the way.

MATT: So spend a little bit of time up front when you’re choosing. I guess that’s the moral of the story.

BRANDON: Exactly. You know, it’s worth doing a lot of the homework before because it’s going to save you in the long run. For instance, when tax time comes around you’re going to have to run these reports and find out how much you’re charged in taxes and what your sales numbers are and those are important to have. So if you are to drop one and lose that data, that’s a big deal. Well, you know, you can always export and drop it in to an excel file of some sort but for the most part, it’s just a pain in the butt to have to move. That’s the bottom line.

MATT: Are there you know any features like sales tax and things like that that people should look for?

BRANDON: Well, as a primary, you might, you know, there’s a lot of people know this, some people don’t, you know, on the internet, you’re not required to charge sales tax to anybody outside of your state. And your state is any state that you do business in or have a location in. So you might be set out to do all your business out of California but you might have a sales branch or another fulfillment house in Florida. Well that means that you actually are located in Florida and California even though you might call your headquarters in California. So because of that you have to pay sales tax in both California and Florida. It’s all basically on an honor system because the IRS is very, I wouldn’t say, forgiving but they sure don’t seem to be going after many people on this level. They’re probably more focused on income taxes.

MATT: It’s really the states that care about the sales tax. That’s where the sales tax are going.

BRANDON: I guess you’re right. The IRS is the wrong term. It’s the state who would be interested in that. But yeah, so you know bottom line is at least in California are sales tax year ends, and I think it’s July, yeah 15th of July. So you need to send in all your sales tax that year or if you’re doing a lot of business, they’ll ask you to do it quarterly. But that will get started with a sales permit and we’re going to get into a lot more detail about that on another episode.

MATT: Yeah the best way to find information about that is go to your you know local states website or for California it’s the Board of Equalization, I’m not sure …

BRANDON: Yeah. That’s typical for most states Board of Equalization I think that they use that term throughout the country but yeah board of equalization. I think you’re secretary of state website might even have it also. So yeah, but the ability to track that’s important and that’s where the reports come in.

MATT: And then there’s even some shopping carts or market places like Amazon which don’t charge that for you which makes it a little bit more complex.

BRANDON: Right. Well, that wraps up our hour and I think we covered a lot in this hour. If you want anymore information, feel free to contact us or keep in tune with our fine episodes, we’re going to go into a lot more details.

MATT: Yeah, if we said anything you don’t agree with or you have more questions, you know, email us.

BRANDON: Yeah, we want questions. Lots of questions because we want to keep in touch with you guys and answer any questions you might have. So send us email. Check out the website automatemysmallbusiness.com

MATT: And send us Twitter feeds at you know the #AMSB. Well, that’s it for Matt.

BRANDON: And this is Brandon and we’ll talk to you next time. Thanks for being here.

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