Shopping cart options for SMBs, Part 1

For those aspiring or already doing business as an e-tail merchant, there is no shortage of e-commerce software developers with shopping cart technology for start-ups and small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). The real difficulty may lie in choosing among them and then putting it to productive use.

A shopping cart worth its salt should also produce search engine optimization-friendly URLs for its products, said VevoCart's Vince Pichpongsa. "This will help search engines to crawl, index and rank e-commerce sites more efficiently. Then, the e-commerce Web site can get noticed in natural search results."

To get the most out of shopping cart software, an e-tailer must leverage what it knows about its customers and product offerings and incorporate that into their shopping cart and e-commerce software - something Forrester Research terms "experience-based differentiation".

"Functionality can indeed be standard and commoditized in a variety of businesses types (e.g. SMB vs. Global Enterprises)," Usability Sciences' general manager Eric Feige told the E-Commerce Times.

"What differentiates them from one another is not the functionality, but the businesses intimate understanding of their existing and prospective customer experience and how they leverage that understanding to differentiate," he added.

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