Some online shopping carts are very simple and easy for the online merchant to use. The advantage of these simple shopping carts is that they are easy to set up and easy for online merchants to control and use without needing a lot of experience with online programs or coding. However, online shopping cart software has been constantly improving for years and now offer a lot of great features and options that can help a merchant generate more sales and more profit.

One of the great features that many new online shopping carts have is to automatically send order confirmation Emails. Online shopping can be a bit scary to some people and it is reassuring to get an Email that lets them know that their order was received without problem and that their order is on the way. It is also very nice to get an Email thanking the customer for their business. These order confirmation Emails can help generate return customers which gives you a consistent customer base.

Many customers also like to have their less sensitive information saved so that they do not have to enter it each time they place an order with you. And modern online shopping carts can do that as well. Whenever a customer returns to your online store they simply have to sign in and when they place their order, all of their less sensitive information is already entered. Sensitive information such as credit card numbers should usually not be saved because of the security risk. Some online shopping carts also track customer preferences and can inform them about related products. For example, if you sell CDs you can set up your online shopping cart to inform buyers of a Beethoven CD about other classical music CDs that you offer. This is a great way to generate larger sales from existing customers. Online shopping carts can even generate market research for you. You can keep track of the amount of abandoned sales, make changes to your store or shopping cart, and then see if the changes you made improved your rate of abandoned sales or not. You can also track the geographical locations of your customers to see trends and capitalize on them.

One of the worst parts about being a merchant is keeping track of inventory, but online shopping carts can do that too. Each time an order is place the online shopping cart can automatically update your inventory and even communicate the inventory to customers so that they know how many items you have left of each product. Split testing is the process of using two separate web pages that have the same content to see which one does better with customers. Online shopping carts allow you to track the sales generate by each of the pages being split tested to see which one generates the most sales and even see if the two pages have their own advantages and disadvantages for generating different kinds of sales. Online shopping cart technology has come a long way and gives online merchants so many features and so much relevant data that if you use a simpler or dated online shopping cart you will miss out on sales. That is the plain and simple truth.