Shopping Cart Ecommerce - 4 Ways to Avoid Integration Nightmare With Your Ecommerce Shopping Cart

A shopping cart is your online business presence most people will encounter when purchasing your products. If it doesn't do everything you need, you will have to either extend the software or integrate it with another application.

Over the years I have been in a variety of businesses and seen a lot of different software applications. It doesn't matter whether you are a Fortune 500, or a one man shop - by far, the largest challenge every businesses has is integrating two (or more) packages together. In fact, the smaller the business the harder it is to integrate since it is difficult and expensive to hire competent resources to perform the integration.

The first key is to find a solution that accomplishes as much as possible of your prioritized feature list. Having a function built in is the absolute best way to avoid any integration issues. Even if the feature is not 100% what you want, not having to integrate might be enough to justify using a slightly different version of the feature than what you originally had in mind.

The second key is to find a partner you can work with who understands your business. I have seen many businesses choose a solution based on the features exclusively and did not give any thought to the partner they would be working with. In some ways, the partner is the more important decision. If you can not work with them, you will have all sorts of troubles. A good partner that wants to grow a relationship with you will work with you to grow the software to meet your needs. If they are really good, and your request is relatively generic, the new features will be useful to others. The take away should be that other people's requests and feature changes should benefit you.

The third key is does the shopping cart software provide a stable API (Application Programming Interface)? While this requires you to have or hire technical resources, having a stable (and that is critical) API will future proof you to changes in the software. While most providers say their API is stable, verify it and get it in writing. You are making an investment using their API, you want to make sure that investment is good.

Fourth, if all of the above do not work for you, the absolute minimum that should be provided is the ability to download information. With the raw data, you should be able to have a technical resources construct whatever interface you need. Having access to the data is critical though. Advanced solutions will provide you with the ability to grab specific portions of the data filtered on the criteria that matters to you.

Choosing an eCommerce Shopping Cart solution can be challenging to get the right mix of features. Make sure you choose one that allows you to easily integrate it with your other systems.

To learn more about eCommerce Shopping Carts visit eCommerce Explained

Chris Hane is the the co-founder of www.RedOakCart.com, an eCommerce Shopping Cart that specializes in working with information marketers.

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