We’re Having a Shopping Cart Experience
Yes, after much thinking, opinion gathering and planning, we’re about to have our very own shopping cart experience. Naturally, being writers, we’re going to blog about it as many of our site visitors are e-tailers, or people planning to become e-tailers so we hope it might be of interest.
The shopping cart is for a new website we’re establishing – from which we’ll market and sell our own high quality PLR article packs. We’ve chosen a hosted cart option and Magicdust is our chosen supplier. While making our decision, these are the things we had in mind:
1. We wanted a shopping cart with a simple admin panel. Our business isn’t complicated and we don’t want making changes to the site to be complicated either. We looked at the Magicdust admin demo several times and compared it to others. It looked like the simplest and most appropriate set up for us. Bells and whistles are fine if you need them but they’re just clutter if you don’t!
2. Naturally, we wanted a nice design. Now design is a very subjective thing but for us, something that is uncluttered and easy on the eye, yet attractive seems the way to go. We viewed the sites Magicdust had listed as samples of their work. Only one was appealing to us. We decided to dig further so we searched “powered by Magicdust” to find other sites they’d designed. Obviously, their designers are working to client instructions so we didn’t expect to like everything we saw – but we saw enough to be confident that they had some skilled designers on their team.
3. Looking at a lot of the shopping cart sites they’d created gave us a new concern. Most of them had no ranking at all – so we began to worry about SEO. Just a couple we found had good rankings. So we went back and looked over the shopping cart sites to see if we could see the problem. It was very obvious – the carts with no ranking had very little content. Some had plenty of products, but they were only supported by one or two sentence product descriptions and many had no other significant content on the sites. By contrast, the sites with ranking had lengthier product descriptions and plenty of other content.
4. Next, we scoured the forums looking for comments on Magicdust as the level of customer service, particularly post-construction is quite important to us – we’re going to be asking a lot of stupid questions! We found one very negative item but the writer wasn’t very clear about just what the problem had been and his comments suggested that he didn’t really understand that as it was a hosted shopping cart solution, he didn’t really own it. As the business seems to have created quite a few sites, we decided to disregard this item.
5. Finally, we asked some of the designers and SEO folk we know. None had heard any negative reports and we established that to have our own shopping cart website designed so we’d own it would be quite an expensive exercise. We decided that as the Magicdust design solution we needed was inexpensive at around AU$1000, the hosting would only amount to about $600 a year, and the site could be up and running quite quickly, it was worth starting out this way.
It did occur to us to contact some of the people operating Magicdust shopping carts and ask them directly about their experiences, but we decided this would be futile as the outcome would be predictable – those with good rankings and traffic would probably be happy, and those whose sites weren’t attracting traffic would be unhappy – and it would not have been the fault of Magicdust.
Completion time for our PLR article site is estimated at about 8 weeks, although with Christmas fast approaching, I suspect it might be a little longer. During that time, our writers will be busy writing the PLR articles, in between all the other unique articles and blog posts that they write.
If you have any topic suggestions for PLR article packs, or you’d like to be notified when the PLR articles will be available for purchase, feel free to send us an email.
This will be my first shopping cart experience so I’ve love to hear from anyone with any advice – particularly anyone who’s had a shopping cart experience that has exceeded their expectations! We love good news.
© Article Writers Australia 2009
