1. Hosted Shopping Cart

A hosted shopping cart means that there is no software to install on your ISP's web server. Everything resides on UltraCart's own servers. There are a lot of major benefits to using a hosted shopping cart. First off, you don't have to install complicated software that is difficult and time consuming. Not having to upgrade software on a periodic basis is an even greater benefit that isn't immediately apparent. When you use a hosted shopping cart, like UltraCart, you immediately derive benefit each time the service is enhanced without having to do anything! So when you're comparing UltraCart to all the other shopping cart software out there ask yourself how much time you'll have to spend installing that and how many Tylenol it will require to cure the headache! On a more technical note, installed shopping carts will require you to provide your own SSL (Secure Socket Layer) server to make secure transactions possible. The SSL certificates sold by the industry leader, Verisign, cost $349 for the first year and $249/year after that. UltraCart saves you from having to purchase an SSL certificate.

2. No transaction fees per order

Some shopping carts charge you transaction fees for each order. Don't you already have enough fees being eaten up by the credit card company? Why add another one to the list! At the time this article was written, one competitor charged 0.75-1.5% transaction fees on all orders on top of their monthly hosting fee. (Source 09/16/2003)

3. Free telephone support

You've just signed up for this incredibly great shopping cart deal (or so you think) and then you run in to the brick wall. You've encountered a problem that you're not sure how to solve or where to find the information to solve it. You go to your shopping cart vendor's home page and click on support. What do you find? If you can even find a telephone number, you should expect to be charged a per incident fee or yearly contract just to access support! At the time this article was written, a competitor charged $399/year or $40/hour for toll-free, email, and live-chat support. (Source 09/16/2003) Everything is about total cost of ownership (TCO)! Consider the cost of support when determining what your shopping cart service is going to cost. UltraCart offers free support via telephone, email, instant messenger, and online chat Monday-Friday 9 AM - 5 PM PST at no additional cost. How many shopping carts will offer you complete support during a trial period? Very few!

4. Complete Back Office Solution

It's very important to evaluate the back office functionality of your shopping cart solution. There is far more to a shopping cart solution than the checkout screens that your customer interacts with. Consider all the work that most take place after an order is placed such as editing, review, payment authorization, and shipping. If the shopping cart does nothing more than email you a copy of the order then you're doing far more manual work that you should have to! So be very skeptical of that free shopping cart that comes with your credit card gateway or ISP. There is a reason it's free! UltraCart's complete back office solution will assist you with every step of the order's life cycle. It's easy to edit orders, process payments, and process shipments. There are great time savers like printable packing slips and address labels. Why waste your valuable time typing these documents by hand?

5. Secure Digital Content Sales

Some shopping carts claim to sell digital content, but fail to do it securely. Unless your digital content is served up using a unique URL for each order then it is not being served up securely. Many shopping carts simply authorize the order and then redirect the customer to the URL where it's downloaded from. What happens when someone sends that URL that does not change to all their friends? They all download the file and you lose many sales! You can tell if your hosted shopping cart solution has a problem if the digital content resides on your ISP instead of your shopping cart vendor's server. UltraCart provides secure digital downloads across a network of servers. Each customer receives a unique URL to access their downloads. The unique URL expires after a specified amount of time and can only be attempted a specified amount of time. This scheme provides the greatest balance of security and ease of download possible.

6. Secure Coupon Codes

Many shopping carts offer coupon codes. This functionality is nothing new to shopping carts, but are the coupons that you give out secure? If not then that good deal of yours is going to end up on sites like www.slickdeals.net. Since UltraCart has a built-in email marketing system it can generate unique one time use coupon codes and dynamically insert them in to the emails as they go out. Now you can sleep easy at night knowing that your promotional offer is not going to be abused.

7. Shipper Integration

UltraCart has tight integration with the world's most popular shipping vendors! UltraCart is capable of real-time estimation of shipping costs between your customer and your shipping location. Accurate shipping costs will save you significant money (especially if you ship international). Besides shipping cost estimation, UltraCart is capable of exporting all your information into a variety of shipper back-end software, including FedEx Ship, UPS WorldShip, and Endicia DaZZle. Within seconds of clicking the export button on UltraCart you can be printing shipping labels. Now that is a major time saver! It gets better though. The tracking numbers assigned by the shipper can be imported in to UltraCart. UltraCart will then send your customer an email notification that the order has shipped (including a link to tracking information that looks like it's hosted on your website)

8. Supports Over Two Dozen Transaction Gateways

UltraCart supports a wide range of credit card and electronic check gateways such as Authorize.Net and Verisign. Merchants are free to competitively shop the merchant credit card processing market for the best deal on continuous basis by choosing a shopping cart that supports such a wide range. Too often merchants choose a cart that only supports their credit card gateway and are forced to change shopping carts just to get a better credit card processing arrangement. Almost all credit card gateways are created equal (or close enough for government work) so why not choose a shopping cart the will help level the playing field and save you money? UltraCart supports: AccessPoint, Authorize.Net, Corcord EFSnet, ECHO, eProcessingNetwork, Iongate, LinkPoint, Moneris e-Select, PayByCheck, Plug'N Pay, Verisign PayFlow Pro, and viaKlix. If your transaction gateway is not on this list, we'll add it for free!

9. Integrated E-mail Marketing

It is often said that it is ten times easier to retain an existing customer than it is to attract a new one. This saying holds true for online commerce. In today's online world, email communication between a merchant and their customers is very important. It's how you remind customers to continuous shop at your website and make them aware of your sales and new merchandise. UltraCart's integrated e-mail marketing engine makes communication with customers simple. Merchants can send one-time and recurring campaigns to one or more e-mail lists. E-mail lists are created by either importing existing information or creating rules to extract it from the customer basis. How many shopping carts can send e-mail campaigns to customers that bought a certain product or are a certain time period? Very few! Imagine sending an e-mail to a customer two weeks after purchasing something with a coupon for free ground shipping on their next order. Now that is powerful!

10. Easy Integration

Since UltraCart is a hosted shopping cart there is no software to install on your web server. So how does it integrate in to your website? Simple! Place two types of links on your website: buy and view cart buttons. How much simpler can it get than that? You're probably wondering how the checkout will look compared to your website since there is nothing to install. Exactly the same! You can brand the checkout screens with content just like your website (including background images, colors, etc.) so that customers don't even realize they're checkout out on a different server. It's all done in a way that allows it to look just like your website, but still be secure at the same time!