10 – Shopping Carts

Episode 010 - Shopping Carts
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:27] Hey everybody it's Tom here. This is episode 10 of screw the commute podcast How to Pick a shopping cart system that makes you money.

[00:00:38] Hope you listen to the last episode with dusty white. He's a student of mine and is making a fortune in an odd ball arena. Legitimately. So check that out. Dusty White on Episode 9.

[00:00:57] All right our sponsor today is kickstartcart.com. This is the shopping cart system that I've been using for 16 years and promoting because it's usable by a mere human. So we'll get into more of that later.

[00:01:12] Picking a shopping cart system is a pretty serious decision that you're going to likely have to live with for a while. Simply too important a decision to make without knowing the right questions to ask.

[00:01:23] So many systems are frustrating to install and once they're installed they're incomprehensible and extremely difficult to use which means lost sales for you. In fact I had one lady come to me she was paying four thousand dollars a month for a part time person to just operate her shopping cart system and it was a great system but it was far too overkill for her. And expensive as all get out. So what you've got to make sure the most important to you is if your customer sitting in front of their computer with an open wallet or in front of their cell phone or tablet you better not make it hard for them to buy or they're going to be gone in a flash.

[00:02:09] You really want to automate every part of the system so it's less work for you and it's extremely easy for your customer. Now today's smart shopping system technology can make this happen and any small business can afford it. In addition smart shopping systems are going to dramatically increase sales because they manage the entire shopping process including upselling the customer making special offers handling specials sales and discounts and completely managing your extremely valuable database of prospects and customers E-mail all of that. There are thousands of simple shopping carts on the market either for free or low price. But basically they just take the order like a cashier at the grocery store. They don't do anything to help you sell in the first place. Now I got a warning for you you're going to have webmasters all the time trying to sell you a custom shopping cart. That can cost you anywhere from a few hundred dollars to multi tens of thousands of dollars. This is crazy. They're going to tell you what you want to do with your site is going to require lots of expensive programming custom adaptations that they're going to use all this language on you. But there are very few small business people and I've coached literally several thousand that need anything so sophisticated so keep your wall in your pocket when you get around these people. Now the sad thing is to me you may already have a ton of money invested in your shopping system and you may not have the sales you think you should. It might be time to consider scrapping the old system in favor of a new less expensive system that has all the sales tools built in.

[00:04:03] And I know this sucks but it's just like a computer. You keep trying to make the old one work work work work work and a new one is ten times cheaper and a thousand times faster. It just comes to that point when you really need to upgrade. All right the first concept you need to realize is that you must have real time credit card processing. This has to be automated and fast or you're going to look antiquated and old and slow. People don't want that nowadays. But what you must realize is that the credit card processing is not actually done by the shopping cart. Many people don't realize this. You still have to have a credit card merchant account to process the credit card. If you don't have real time processing capability you're shopping carts just going to e-mail you notice of a sale and you've got a log in and send them an ebook or mail them their product but they don't get anything instantly telling them what happened. I mean it's just really old school.

[00:05:04] Now you can use PayPal rather than a full blown merchant account and there's other competitors to PayPal out there none of which are as well-known and as secure as PayPal while they might be secure because there's a standard for security on the Internet. But they haven't have the track record. Put it that way.

[00:05:25] Now after the transaction is complete and sometimes maybe five seconds or less you either get an e-mail regarding shipping your product or the customer gets a link to download the product directly. That's all there is to it. Now I've simplified it considerably but believe me you don't want to know all the details you just want it to work. So the bottom line is just know that your shopping cart system is different from your actual merchant account your merchant account is the legal entity you have with the Visa MasterCard American Express people. And it's a whole different animal. But they have to work together. That's what you need to know.

[00:06:03] Now this is episode 10. You might want to keep that in mind because I'm going to run through a whole bunch of things your shopping cart should do. If you listen to this somewhere you might not want to bother writing it down because they have an entire e-book that goes in more depth than has checklists and everything at the Web site Screwthecommute.com in the show notes for Episode 10. So you can get a whole PDF that tells all of this stuff you don't have to take any notes. All right so here's some of the things a shopping cart system should do for you.

[00:06:38] A standard thing is calculate shipping and tax. So most cards can do that. However you must realize shipping is one of the biggest pains in the neck of all because people are in different parts of the country. There's different shipping methods and all this stuff is involved with shippings a less sophisticated card is not going to give you the options to handle all that stuff and sales tax. Now at the time of this recording and for a long time prior to this sales tax was only needed to be collected on physical products shipped in the same state where you are domiciled where you're based now there's fighting like crazy about all of this. So that may change in the future but it's pretty much going to be the shopping carts duty to handle that for you. You may have to plug in at different rates for different areas but pretty much nothing to worry about right now.

[00:07:34] Next thing is soft and hard goods. This is extremely important for anyone who wants to sell information product because a hard good is like a DVD or a CD. And those are still very prevalent in the gift market for sure. I go down and see the red box that's in front of 7-Eleven. There's always somebody getting a DVD out of there. So they're still using those things. So you may want to sell them I sell a tennis DVD but you also want to sell soft goods which are ebooks digital products in other words so some carts you can't do that in the same transaction at least some of these free carts they give you with your hosting. So you don't want to do that. You want to have something they'll deliver both soft and hard goods in the same transaction.

[00:08:20] Also when you're delivering a soft good the downloadable product and the shopping cart should generate a web page for the download that disappears automatically after a certain period of time I think ours is set the 24 hours. So the person purchasing can't take the download link and put it up on a discussion board to let thousands of people download your product for free. So that's an important feature to have when you have digital products.

[00:08:51] Another feature is featured products. This is when people are shopping you may want to emphasize a certain product. So as they're going through your shopping experience and they get into the cart, the cart can pop up a product that you want to have featured and sometimes you want it every time maybe that's your main product you're pushing. So that's called featured products.

[00:09:16] Now related products that's a different issue. That means when they put a certain product in your cart you have preprogrammed the cart so that it says hey if they put product X in the cart I want to show them product Y. Because it matches product X and it's most likely they would buy it. So these are related to what the customer is actually doing in the cart. And this is prior to checkout. There's a different system. Once they go to check out called upselling we'll get to that later.

[00:09:53] Product descriptions seems like a normal thing but in this particular case we want to put a salesy type description right at the title of the product that they are trying to purchase to try to keep them excited about purchasing. I'm going to talk about this several times shopping cart abandonment where people get stuff in the cart and they get the checkout but they don't check out. That really sucks. So product descriptions help keep the people excited about it and it's just a line of text that you can put in near the title of the product that's called product description.

[00:10:33] Inventory. If you sell a lot of physical goods it'd be nice if the cart would keep track when you need to reorder. So that's what inventory is and a lot of the cheapo carts won't do that.

[00:10:47] Now this is a really really advanced feature that you would only find on very very good shopping carts and that's called a customizable continue shopping page. You've all seen the button that says continue shopping in shopping carts. Well you can customize it based on what they just put in the cart to send them something related to what they just purchased. So it's different than just displaying something that's related. It's when they take the action to click continue shopping. You can send them a certain place. So let's say that you are selling sports equipment and somebody just put a baseball in the cart when they click continue shopping. It would be stupid to let them go to your main catalog or to send them to golf clubs right. They just put a baseball in the cart. So you could set it so that when they put a baseball in the cart and click continue shopping they go to the baseball bats or helmets or anything baseball related. So that's a very very important thing. You want to make it easy for your customers to buy more stuff right.

[00:11:58] Offer management most lower end shopping cards don't have the capability to offer discounts for multiple purchases or to offer like let's say one free when you buy three or those kinds of special offers. So having that capability could really increase the average amount that someone spends when they shop with you.

[00:12:21] Receipt and confirmation e-mails. Well those are pretty standard things too. So most carts will have those but they are important and it's nice if you can customize them and say nice things on them or give them your customer service number. Some of them are just plain Jane that you can't really do much with but you want ones that you can customize.

[00:12:44] Dropship capability drop shipping is when someone you sell something but somebody else fulfills the order. So you want the card to be able to send that order notice to someone else besides yourself. Sure you want a notice of all your orders but you don't want to have to manually send the order to the dropship company that's going to ship the product so that can all be automated.

[00:13:13] Backend output to your accounting software makes it nice and easy. If you're using something like QuickBooks or Peachtree or Quicken to export your sales and all the stuff right into accounting program.

[00:13:28] All right now this is one that's really I don't want to say dear to my heart because it caused me a lot of grief in years past. This is associate programs commonly called affiliate programs. This is where someone else can put a link on their website. And when someone clicks on it and buys something from you they get a commission. It's like having an army of commissioned salespeople out there. Well when I first started oh my God a shopping cart costs two thousand dollars it wouldn't do hardly anything. The affiliate module that I'm just talking about right now cost eleven hundred more dollars from a different company. Six months later it still wouldn't work and all the geeks from one company here are blaming the other company's geeks that it won't work. So this is terrible. So you want your shopping cart system to have the affiliate program built in so one company is handling everything it was built to work together. If anything goes wrong there's no arguing with different companies. And maybe you didn't know this but Amazon really invented this years ago and now it's available to all businesses at reasonable rates I mean I'm sure they put millions of dollars to develop it and now we can do it with good shopping cart systems.

[00:14:53] Upselling modules. Now this is a little different than related products. This is after the person clicks checkout. We commonly call it do you want fries with that. It's after they're committed to buy something. Then we offer them something else. I mean every store on earth has a bunch of nail clippers and stuff and magazines at the checkout counter right. So it's a big revenue source in fact you very seldom see me do a promotion where I offer an upsell after they've taken the main product and I'm going to do a whole episode on this in the future. But they typically if you do it correctly and I'm going explain all the theory behind it in another episode if you do it correctly 30 to 50 percent of the people will take that. And it means an enormous amount of money. So I'll just tell you a story about this one time years ago. I'm so pitiful. I accidentally threw a teleclass on Thanksgiving. I didn't realize it was Thanksgiving. That's pretty pitiful you got it admit. It was How to Make Money Speaking at Fundraising. 60 people signed up for it at 30 bucks a piece that was 1800 bucks. That's pretty good for a holiday seminar I guess they didn't want to drink beer with Uncle Joe and watch football that day.

[00:16:21] But when they clicked on checkout so that they could pay for the seminar. The cart offered them several deals. This is called upselling and it's normally only offered on really expensive shopping carts. But now it's available to you.

[00:16:36] Well listen to this. 21 people went for the upsell and that gave me an extra two thousand thirty seven dollars which made the whole promotion thirty eight hundred thirty seven dollars. This is I don't know. This is 15 years ago so I'm sure you can see this is a real powerful thing and something you absolutely want in your shopping cart system because it can bring in loads of extra money. All right. That's upselling.

[00:17:06] Database handling customer data coming into a shopping cart system should never have to be retyped. It should be able to be manipulated. You have to be able to e-mail your customers or customers that bought a specific product or when I say shopping cart system the word system is critical here because it handles all kinds of things. It handles your e-mail capture if you give a freebie a way to gather database information that handles your e-mail newsletters a good one will handle unlimited different e-mail newsletters for you. So that's your database of people prospects and customers so you definitely want that. In the old days we had to take an order retype it into Act and it took hours to try to e-mail. All crazy.

[00:18:00] I mentioned broadcast a minute ago. You want to be able to broadcast e-mail to very specific groups of people or to all your people. And here's a sales tip don't make every contact with a customer a sales pitch though they'll most likely want to get removed. What you want to do is get them used to getting e-mails from you that help them. So give them customer service tips or some way to use the product they just bought this and that and the other. We're going to get into auto responders here shortly. But you definitely don't want to just pitch pitch pitch in every e-mail because people will unsubscribe. All this is part of what we call e-mail list management. You don't have to buy a separate company to do this if you have a good shopping cart system.

[00:18:50] Another peril of that which I'm kind of stuck with because I've been in this business so long I had 150000 subscribers before the shopping cart was even invented. And I didn't get the first names from a lot of those people so I have multiple systems going but you don't want to do that now because there's occasions when I have to send e-mails and people get two or three of them and they get a little upset with that which I don't blame them. So you want to avoid that by having it all integrated and back in the old days it took hours to make an e-mail broadcast. And there was no mail merge which means you couldn't personalize each e-mail now with a good shopping cart system you can mail merge put their name into it you can put what they bought you can put the date of their order. All kinds of different fields you can pop in and send a broadcast e-mail with all this customized information. That's very powerful.

[00:19:48] Coupons and discounts people love a sale they love deals. They love coupons. So you should be able to make a custom coupon for any group of people. Any promotion that you're doing where they pop it in and hit apply and it throws the discount on and the discounts can be a percentage off it can be a dollar amount off it could be free shipping whatever it is. But you can easily do that. And with our training it takes I don't know if you're not too swift it might take us two minutes to teach you how to do. All right so it's but it's extremely powerful. Made me a fortune over the years.

[00:20:31] Now this next one I want you to really really take this one to heart nobody lives on one website anymore. There's multiple blogs websites all kinds of things for different products and services that people make money on. Well if you're shopping cart is one that your host gave you, you can only use it on that one Web site on that one host. And that's just crazy. If you have another host which you should have multiple hosts if you have multiple websites because you don't want all your eggs in one basket. You have to have another shopping cart system at the other place. That's crazy. So a good shopping cart system you can have multiple websites go through it. This is really great. I probably have about 70 different websites going through my shopping cart. Now I have to have the same logo and I can only dump the money into one commercial checking account. But guess what. It's still way better than having 70 different shopping carts. I wouldn't bother to do it if it was that hard. So multiple Web site capability is really important. A good shopping cart will run on its own server and it's just accessing all your other websites so that's how that works.

[00:21:47] Now this next one oh gee if you ask guys like me I've been in this since 1994 when the commercial internet started. You asked people who have been in as long as me. What are some of the most powerful things ever invented for marketers online.

[00:22:07] And this next topic will be at the top of everybody's list and that's called autoresponders more specifically sequential order responders. We started out with autoresponders where you could just do one. People would email a certain email or contact your website and your Web site would respond with one message back to them. Almost like the old fax on demand. Those of you old enough to remember that. But now sequential autoresponders will not only send the first message they'll send another one and another one another one and spread them out in-between. As far as you want. I have some sequences going out six months or more. This is all integrated in the shopping cart. And you can make all kinds of things with these you can make E courses either free or paid where they're delivered automatically. You can do customer service. You can do upselling with automatically through e-mail. So somebody buys product X. They get a series of e-mails that are giving them tips and then eventually another e-mail comes in says hey here's a discount because you bought product X for our new product that goes perfect with a product Y. And so I get sales coming in all the time that I didn't do anything but create that autoresponder series.

[00:23:27] In many cases years ago in fact if you look at my shopping cart I have I think 470 of these series working all the time while I'm sitting here talking to you. So these are very very important and here's a survey from ZDnet big online. I don't know what they do they're big online magazine thing they found that 98 percent of customers would repurchase from a company if they were simply asked. Now if you had to do a lot of business and a lot of transactions like I do we just can't have a staff just calling people and every time they ask them to buy something new. But this does it automatically for me. Yes we do some of that but I couldn't possibly keep up with all of them and many of the people listening to this couldn't either. So autoresponder is really really important.

[00:24:23] Now the next thing is ad tracking. See you may decide you want to put some advertisements in different places on the Internet. And let's say put 10 ads out there and only one of them is bringing paying customers a lot of them are bringing traffic to you. But only one of them is bringing paying customers well if you don't know which one it is you're paying for 10 ads and only one of them is making money for it. That's crazy. So ad tracking as part of a good shopping cart system allows you to tag each ad and track all the way through to see if people bought anything. So you could eliminate nine ads and only keep the ad that was making you money. And then you could go try some other places to advertise or change your advertisement but you can't just shoot in the dark and make a lot of money. The people that are making the money are using these kinds of simple and inexpensive tools to keep the numbers right.

[00:25:24] You know the business is run on numbers. And unless you use stuff like this. Numbers can trick you. So let's say you had an ad and your counter was telling you that that ad was brought in 500 people. And the other ads they had two ads at the other ad was brought in 150 people. Well you'd say well gee the ad that brought in 500 people must be better. Well no it might not be because it might be bringing a bunch of freebies seekers that don't buy anything. And the ad is only bringing in 150 people are great buyers. So if you just went on how many people clicked on the ad you would cancel the good ad and keep the bad ads see how crazy this can get?

[00:26:11] A good shopping cart will also help you keep track of conversion ratio. That's the number of people that did what you wanted. Compared to the number of people that saw what you were doing. So let's just give an example let's say you had 5000 visitors and it brought in 50 sales at ninety seven dollars. That would be a 1 percent conversion rate. So one percent of 5000 is 50 sales and you made four thousand eight hundred fifty bucks. Hey sounds pretty good right. But what if that's your overhead and you basically did all that work and you just broke even. What if you could increase that conversion ratio to 2 percent which means you make 100 sales and you'd make ninety seven hundred dollars and you'd make a profit for four thousand eight hundred fifty. That's why numbers count and your shopping cart can keep track of all this and allow you to try different things to see which one is bringing you in the best customers.

[00:27:17] So I hate to harp on numbers because it can get daunting but these carts take all the worry out for you with five minutes of tutoring you set this up and then the cart does it all for you. You don't have to do a bunch of math that tells you right. You just open up log in and boom there's your numbers. There's your conversion rate. There's how much money you brought in. There's how many people visited. All of that's right in front of you.

[00:27:43] Another thing you can do is ad rotation. You might have and this is also called split testing and this is really how the big players get rich. Split testing is where let's say you have two sales letters sales letter A and sales letter B and you don't know which one is best. So the cart will make a specific link for you that will rotate in between those two ads so the first person visits sales letter A the second person visits sales letter B. The third person goes back to sales letter A and it alternates them all the way through. So let's say you had a hundred visitors 50 of them would have seen sales letter A 50 sales letter B and the cart tracks them all the way through to see which one made you the most money and you get rid of loser and then you keep trying different things different headlines and running ads against each other to see which one brings you the most money and over time the guy that taught me this was such a fanatic from the first sales letter on a promotion he was doing until the final one.

[00:28:53] After all this testing the final one brought in 19 times the sales now which would you rather have just pat yourself on the back because you've got a couple of sales or 19 times sales. All right. So this is why this is so important.

[00:29:08] OK another advance feature is called order form sell through. This is on expensive products. You really want people to be excited excited excited to keep that sale going and finally check out. So this is a big area where you can put almost another ad in for the same product showing all the benefits because again we go back to that shopping cart abandonment. You don't want them to get cold feet at the last second and not check out. So that's called order form sell through.

[00:29:41] Here's another super super one when you get the ebook underline this and lipstick blood make a big emphasis on this called recurring billing. This allows you to either have ongoing sales were charging somebody monthly for like a membership or if you're selling a product you let them make payments. Now let me give you an example of how powerful this can be. I have a Wordpress ecourse that teaches you how to make inexpensive websites and by the way episode 4 is all about that all about WordPress sites and responsive themes and all the things you need to know about inexpensive Web sites. Even though there's still world class. That's episode 4.

[00:30:28] Anyway when I did this promotion I sold 700 of these courses. But here's the really interesting thing and they were ninety seven dollars apiece. The interesting thing to me was that a hundred and eighty of those sales were three payments of thirty nine dollars. So the 180 those people couldn't afford to put a whole 97 dollars. Or maybe they didn't trust me and wanted to just check it out and quit their payments. If I'm a rip off or something but anyway 180 people paid 39 dollars for three payments which is one hundred seventeen dollars all told which was the 20 dollar extra just because they couldn't fit all 97 on their credit card at one time.

[00:31:16] Well guess what. If I hadn't had that recurring billing in there that option and I lost those hundred eighty sales. Did the math there is twenty one thousand sixty dollars I would have lost. So which would you rather have twenty one thousand sixty dollars over three months or nothing from those people. So it's pretty easy to answer that question. So that's called recurring billing.

[00:31:44] All right sales reports. Good shopping cart systems will give you all kinds of sales reports in different ways so you can see the information that you want and it will help you decide what's working and what isn't. So you can have sales by date. How many sales on a certain day sales by item how many of different products. What's the best selling product today or this week. You can always change the dates range that you want to check on.

[00:32:13] Sales by client. That's an important one because you want to identify your best clients and then maybe send them some gift cards or some thank yous if they're spending lots of money with you. They even have sales by what kind of credit card they use. Sales by what advertising or promotion you did sales by affiliates so this is keeping track of all the people that are out there promoting you on commissions so that sales by affiliates.

[00:32:42] Analytics are important. Analytics are like I was telling your shopping cart abandonment it tells you how many people hit the cart. How many people actually checked out how many left and maybe there's something you can do to improve that. How did you hear about us field is important so that you can glean some information. Maybe somebody referred them you can send them a thank you letter maybe some oddball source is talking about you. You can go over there and find out if you've got mentioned in a magazine or something. And them thank them or follow up with them so you want these kinds of little nuances can add up to big big sales for you.

[00:33:23] Now help with offline shopping. That's if somebody has some kind of trouble or glitch. What happens is I still get a notice that somebody tried to order and maybe their Internet glitched on them or maybe they put an invalid credit card number. Well I don't want them to get frustrated and leave. So if I see that I immediately or one of the staff calls. Because if they tried to fill out the form their phone numbers probably still there. So we call them and frequently we can save the sale. So that's called offline shopping.

[00:33:57] So there's way more details than this but I created a checklist for you to evaluate your own shopping cart if you have one or if you're considering a new one and it will be in the show notes this is episode 10 and you can download the PDF it's called How to get a shopping cart system that makes you money. I think the main title is Internet cash machines which is what a shopping cart is and has this big checklist in it and more details on all these things I've been telling you about including the break down if you tried to build one of these yourself or let a custom programmer do it. All the different modules. How much it would cost you to have them program if you could even find somebody competent that could do it. And it's going to cost you if you could.

[00:34:48] So of course my recommendation is to get kickstartcart.com go there you get a 30 day free trial. It has all the stuff I've been talking about today. It's hosted on their server so you can run multiple Web sites you get free upgrades. They take care of everything. Like I said multiple Web sites has the auto responders. We've got the discount coupons it's got the offer management upselling does soft and hard goods. All the customizable pages your database your broadcast e-mail your ad checking your conversion your ad rotation your split testing your order form sell through your recurring billing sales reports all of these things including that affiliate program that drove me crazy and cost me eleven hundred bucks years ago. So it's all in there. So it's kickstartcart.com.

[00:35:45] We give you unlimited unlimited free tutoring one on one. I mean we have videos and all kinds of things for you but we will hold your hand through it if you need to change from your old shopping cart to this new one we help you if you're brand new at this we help you. And it's unlimited you can call back any time we can make an appointment. We'll shut the world out and help you because this is the lifeblood of an online business or even offline businesses. All have an online portion where they sell things. So this is really great. I've been using it personally and my business with multi millions of dollars of sales for 16 straight years so it's works and it's reliable. So check it out. This is episode 10. Make sure you check the show notes download the PDF file with more in-depth information. Glad to check with us if you need help or have more questions you can e-mail me. It's all on the show notes there at screwthecommute.com and next episode Episode 11 I'm interviewing John Kramer. This is a guy that has helped his clients sell 1 billion books. That's with a B. This guy is prolific. I've known him for well over 20 years. He's the number one go to guy for book marketing and I'll tell you what all his stuff is in all my products have an influence with John Kramer in them because the stuff he teaches works for way more than just books. So check that out in Episode 11 this is episode 10. Download the PDF file. And check out a good shopping cart. Start making money online. This is Tom Antion. I'll catch you on the next episode.

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