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Shopping carts are getting more sophisticated features and affiliates are poised to take advantage of all the bells and whistles.
A former computer special effects artist, Christina Hills, ditched her star-studded career working magic for Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, The Lost World: Jurassic Park and The Perfect Storm to move to Northern California's Sierra Nevada and launch her business as a shopping cart consultant.
As owner of ShoppingCartQueen.com, an affiliate of 1Shopping Cart.com and a few other related merchants, she quickly found that "the more affiliates can match the look of the merchant's site to the look of their website, the better their sales will be."
Industry watchers say customers clicking from one page to the next don't want a disconnect; they don't want to realize they're suddenly on another site. That makes them wonder what page they landed on and if they can trust that site. It also makes them nervous about entering their credit card information. Internet experts cite these reasons, even if they're not always conscious thoughts, as chief among why customers abandon the purchases in their shopping carts and move on.
A solution for these issues is affiliate-side shopping cart functionality. Orders go from your affiliate site to a software system that requires only one input of customer purchase and shipping information and then parcels out the individual orders to the respective merchants – all while counting toward each of your merchant's affiliate program sales.
It's a tricky endeavor when you consider all of the routes an affiliate sale can take and the different order coding each merchant requires. But resourceful affiliates are making it work.
"Most of our clients are affiliates," says Martin Toha, founder of OrderMachine .com. "They started marketing for a company, realized they could do it for themselves better, started becoming affiliates and did it that way. Many even buy the shopping cart to resell it."Sure, it's easy for customers to make purchases using Buy Now buttons that send them straight to, say, Amazon.com. But the merchant's sales message isn't specifically honed to your customer's needs. And once the buyer jumps off your site, there's no guarantee they'll be able to find their way back to shop your other merchant options.Besides, the payoff for affiliate-side carts is more than just continuity. It also boosts sales, says Martin Wales at 1Shopping Cart.com. "We've seen 300 to 400 percent increases in sales when [affiliates actively upsell and start using] their own carts."The percentage of affiliates using their own shopping carts is small, but growing.
"How much would you pay the worst support person in the world to follow up with all your customers and take phone calls?" Wales says. "Compare that to a cart that takes 15 minutes to set up and does all of the work and reporting for you."
Return on Investment
Even 1ShoppingCart.com's most expensive version, selling for $15,000, is still a deal, Wales says. "There are people getting that money back in two and a half months."
Advanced functionality also makes today's carts the ultimate in affiliate branding. "Because our system includes the warehouse and the affiliate functions together," says Dan Steinberg, an international payment consultant at OrderMachine.com, "the invoice can actually indicate the name of the affiliate that brings the sale in. The entire process, from beginning to end in a sale, can be private-labeled."
OrderMachine's partnerships with Yahoo's store, Amazon.com and other merchants and payment gateways simplify the process: Any products sold through these partners can be imported into its system so customers can create an order right at the affiliate's site. For 3 percent of gross sales, affiliates can now offer customers an easy, one-step process to order all kinds of affiliate products directly from their own site. That's a huge plus.
Other advances in affiliate-side technology include 10-year-old WebCart.net, which now offers new customer-friendly features, such as regular credit card alongside PayPal processing (also offered by 1ShoppingCart.com), affiliate gift certificates and even affiliate-generated coupons.
"It's up to the merchant and affiliate to negotiate how the commission and the coupon will be paid," says WebCart CEO Jason Ciment. "If you negotiate well, you can credit the coupon against your commission."
Plus, WebCart offers private-label capabilities and is programmed with freeware database software MySQL. "MySQL gives it the power of an Oracle-based system; it could store 30,000 products and it wouldn't blink," says Ciment, who developed the software initially for his sites Mountain Net.com and MagMall.com. It sells in $500 (no private labeling or subscription modules), $800 and $2,500 versions.
Even more shopping cart vendors are integrating behind-the-scenes functions that help affiliates' businesses run much more smoothly. The new shopping cart model, says AISMedia.com CEO Thomas Harpointner, is to "really integrate the website into just standard business instead of something on the Web. From a modular standpoint, I think we're going to see a lot more integration in the future, like shopping carts integrating Peachtree software for accounting."
His company's newly revamped Excerpo Storefront integrates features such as OrderMachine-like manual filling of orders, robust product comparison engines, automated cross-sell engines and couponing based on the amount of business customers have previously done with the site.
"These are features common on enterprise sites, but not readily available for small businesses," Harpointner says. "And an average increase of 10 or 15 percent on every order can really add up over time." Built from custom software upgrades originally done for big-name merchants, it also allows affiliates to enter all of their products – along with affiliate links – into their choice of high-functioning, merchant- quality site templates.
Unlike carts such as OrderMachine and Yahoo Small Business, Excerpo doesn't charge transaction fees. It's $99 to set up, with one-time licensing fees from $99 to $199.95 plus $39.95 per month for hosting (includes technical support, 250 megabits of data space, updates). It, like many others, can grow with you, so customers can consistently use the same functionality they've grown accustomed to even if your site goes from 10 items to 10 million.
1ShoppingCart.com's cart pages can even be hosted on up to 100 different sites; a great solution for those hosting multiple sites who only want to purchase one cart and gather reports on all online income.
"A basic shopping cart can really just take orders," says Rob Bell, creator of 1ShoppingCart.com. "But it takes so much more to even get a potential customer to that point. That's why [the new] services provide it all."
Typical costs to run 1ShoppingCart.com – if you opt not to purchase a one-time license – is $29 per month for the basics and $79 for added functions like autoresponders, affiliate tracking, customizable layouts for private-label partners and newsletter database management.
"There's a big advantage to having a hosted solution like ours, which has invested a quarter of a million in appliances just to protect from server attacks and has 99.9 percent uptime; it takes all the technology worry out," Bell says. Continued on Page 2...
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