New and old requirements on shopping carts and e-commerce solutions

As we have recently released a couple of shopping carts and e-commerce solutions, we have had a chance to validate some of the newer and older requirements when designing these kinds of solutions.

First off we will say that, while we occasionally design mid size marketplaces, most of our shopping carts address the needs of small businesses hence these are shopping carts with less than 50 products. We implement shopping carts in a variety of technologies ranging from Ruby on Rails gems to wooCommerce plug-ins for WordPress.

1. PCI compliance

The needs for PCI compliance are not new. The credit card processing industry had been implementing software security, specific procedures and standards for years. The bigger your company is and the higher the # of transactions you perform, the stricter the requirements are.

What is new is that we get requests from start-ups and other entities (such as educational entities) to provide PCI compliant solutions. That's usually a challenge because the budgets of these kinds of entities generally do not allow for detailed audits and specific procedures. Making a cart PCI compliant does not only involved packing their cart with a SSL certificate or passing the buck to a PCI compliant gateway (even if these things are steps forward to achieving PCI compliance). There are also specific training, internal procedures and manually procedures involved.

2. Products dashboards

Even smaller companies nowadays need the flexibility to add/change/delete products from their stores, edit prices and descriptions, update pictures etc. They also have to have the ability to do that using non-technical staff so they asked us to create product dashboards and management consoles.

3. Custom carts

From pictures to pricing, from layouts to integration with payment processors all of our carts are quite custom designed.

Our clients are asking for that rather than going with more generic (and often miss labeled as more secure or with a higher performance solutions such as Magento, Volusion or Big Commerce). We like that way too. There is no need to overload a small business with bells and whistles when they don't need them and actually can't afford them. Plus the effort spent on configuring a pre-packaged e-commerce solution is often times bigger than integrating a well done open source cart.

4. SEO friendliness

In the era of $25-$30/Google PPC more and more companies come back to the roots of SEO and organic search. They feel that investing long term on that web based real estate where they put their cart on is more important than driving immediate results by paying nightly prices in beach side hotels.

Hence most of the requirements we had for shopping carts lately involved designing the cart with SEO friendliness in mind. And that's everything, from how we call the pages, to how we put the copy of the text on the page and to how we name the pictures of the products. Meta tags too, even if they are lately less important than they used to be.

5. Pictures quality

Pictures quality is more important than ever. Unless you have a professional / superb quality / good size picture of your product, do not even think to put it up. In an era of minimalist websites and responsiveness it is a challenge to produce beautiful pictures that also load fast and scale well on all kinds of devices including laptops, desktops and mobile devices.

6. New industries / verticals

Interestingly enough, we have witnessed some new industries getting into shopping carts and e-commerce solutions. One of them is the education sector with quite a few schools implementing carts for parents to order uniforms or even contribute to school budget with direct donations.

As these kinds of solutions were traditionally adopted more by retailers, wholesalers or companies implementing market places for their own variety of products it is something new that we salute and appreciate.

Make it a great day!

Adrian Corbuleanu
Miami Beach, FL
http://wittywebnow.com