FACT: You are going to be billed separately for each website development project, so staying within your budget can be dicult. Unless you are one of the Fortune 1000 with a web development and design team on payroll, than you are most likely new to eCommerce.
What most new entrepreneurs fail to grasp is that a unique, content rich, beautifully designed website will not be successful if it lacks the proper functions. Those functions have to be coded into your custom design.
For example, you want a nice looking introduction pop-up to capture your visitor information (email address, telephone number), like the ones that TigerDirect and Urban Outfitters are using. The popup design itself is easy, but how will you make it pop up? Where will it pop up? How long will it stay? Where will the entered information be saved?
If you are doing a custom design for your website, note that there are literally millions of lines of code that hide behind that design. If you purchase one of those custom templates (which is not custom at all since anyone can download it and use it), a lack of functionality is almost guaranteed.
As soon as your shopping cart provider stops supporting the template you are using, (or worse, they may have never supported it in the first place) your business will hit a dead end. Your shopping cart can fail altogether, stop taking orders, crash on various screens, and put your business right into the ground because it stopped working properly. Even if nothing breaks, it is just a matter of time before you have outdated features.
Look at Amazon and eBay. Their website design remains unchanged after a decade, and no one seems to mind. Amazon and eBay close billions of dollars in sales every year despite the fact that their sellers all use the same website layout. Not only is the layout cookie cutter, but there are also competitors selling the same thing on the same marketplace. Facebook profiles are the same; Fortune 1000 fan pages just use different graphics and no one seems to mind. My favorite example is Apple. You cannot touch the framework when building the apps for their app store, and your app has to be designed by their standards.
You want your website to look different and unique but not complicated.
If you want a custom homepage you can have it designed by Shopping Cart Elite, and you can even have custom content pages. When it comes to shopping cart functionality such as product pages, search results, and checkout, you will not want to touch these at all.
Shopping Cart Elite maintains a master template to create an industry standard website for all of our clients. You will always have the latest features with extremely high sales conversions since we are constantly enhancing the platform to deliver flexibility, convenience, and a user friendly experience.
In this business, there are bound to be technical issues. Some we will understand, but most of them will send us to the nuthouse. Emailing tech support is in the everyday life of an online businessman. Expect to send a lot of emails with a subject line like WHAT IS GOING ON WITH CHECKOUT if you use a custom template. If you dont track your checkout abandonments, then you will have to wait for about 100 lost customers before one lets you know your shopping cart is not working.
THINK ABOUT IT: A shopping cart is no different; it is a platform, not a high school art project. Are you trying to make money or win a beauty contest?
STILL NOT CONVINCED?
To show you how often this happens, Ill tell you a secret- 7 out of 10 people our sales representatives speak to state that their main reason for switching shopping carts is due to template coding issues, specifically at the checkout area. I bet that was not on your check list when you were starting your website. Be prepared for it if you use another shopping cart.
Here is an email from one of my clients:
My biggest problem with Big Commerce is that something is wrong with the code at some stage of the checkout process, and they are not trying to x it. So I am losing 3-4 customers a day, and very angry customers at that. I dont so much care about the lost sales as much as I care most about the customer. Its plain embarrassing. Big Commerce is one of those companies that you talk about in your videos (I have watched many). They just keep harvesting new customers without providing adequate support. I think changing the template may solve the problem, but that is only a laymans guess. This could easily be a server issue.
This was our reply:
Let me tell you a little story about the checkout process. It is the most critical and fragile thing in an eCommerce platform. It is so fragile that Ive asked my developers to copy reports of any errors that happen during the checkout process, and send them directly to one of my mailboxes. I review them personally every day. The checkout is extremely critical, and it is important that it works perfectly for everyone. Like you said, the checkout process failing is not only a lost sale and a disappointed customer, it is an embarrassing moment for your business. Click here to read more