Over the past decade the Internet has risen to become the most powerful tool in the world economy, as an imperative marketing aid and crucial sales platform for any business looking to remain competitive. Without doubt, this online commercial environment is built on, and depends on shopping cart software and e-commerce applications to enable live online transactions. Moving away from the basic 'brochure' approach, it is shopping cart software that has brought about the level of interactivity we come to expect when shopping online. So when it comes down to choosing shopping cart software for your business, what features should you be looking for to benefit your online presence and to provide you with the greatest level of online customer service?

One of the most crucial elements of your online shopping cart is security, and the software you select must be protective enough and secure enough to win and retain the trust of your customer base. Many shoppers are apprehensive about giving out their credit card details online, and any hint of a lack of security within your system will be enough to lose a customer forever, and to dramatically damage your reputation permanently. Before buying shopping cart software, check the software's security properties, and feel free to probe the distributor for more information on their software's security features before choosing to integrate it within your e-commerce site. By analysing the safety properties of your chosen software application, you can help determine its commercial value prior to installation, a crucial step in preserving your image and reputation online.

Another particularly important feature of any shopping cart application is how search engine friendly the software is. By design, it is possible to streamline shopping cart software to fit in to the website involved without hindering the all important search engine rankings of your site. SEO can be a lengthy and expensive process, and one clumsily designed software application can have a serious detrimental effect on your search engine rankings. To avoid causing search engine damage to your site, it is a good idea to make sure the software is designed with the major search engine algorithms in mind to avoid doing the potential irreparable damage to your website's natural rankings.

On top of that, an important pragmatic feature for any shopping cart system is its ability to handle most major credit and debit cards. You want to find a software application that handles as many payment options as possible to avoid losing a sale. If you can't accept a customer's credit card details, you're losing money and a potential customer forever. To give yourself the best possible chance of winning every sale, you should ensure that every customer can be converted where possible without the barrier of your shopping cart software.

Selecting a shopping cart application is a crucial decision, which can have a massive knock-on effect for the rest of your online operation. With some consideration of these vital elements, finding a suitable shopping cart application that integrates within your existing ecommerce model, whilst vital, may not be too problematic.