Superior Collaborations

If you plan to sell your products or services on the internet you will need an online shopping cart.  By using a shopping cart, your website will be able to sell for you 24/7, even while you sleep! It will process transactions and store all the customer information for your records and future use.  Using an online shopping cart also gives you the advantage of automating your business by allowing you to send autoresponders to your customers to thank them and provide more purchase details.

You have many different choices for which shopping cart to use.  One of the most popular is 1ShoppingCart, which is what I will be referring to here.  Once you have your shopping cart account, you need to create your products and link your website to your shopping cart.  Read on for the steps to adding your first product in your shopping cart.

Once you log in to your shopping cart account, you will be looking at your dashboard.  From the choices along the top, click the down arrow on the one labeled “Products” and then choose “Add a Product.”

The first tab is where you fill out all of the information on your product.

• Enter the name and price of your product and be sure to check the box for “Active.” Those are the required items for your product.  The other items in this section are all optional.
• Add an image of your product
• Write a short and/or long description of your product to display on the cart page.
• Choose an autoresponder to be sent automatically to your customers when they purchase your product.
• Enter a SKU if your product has one or put the product into a category within your shopping cart for organizational purposes.  For example, you may create a category called “E-books” or “Coaching Programs.”
• Save your product and move on to the next tab.

• If your product is on sale, specify the sale price and make that price active.
• If you will be charging a different amount of sales tax or shipping for this product, you will enter it here.  When you are setting up your cart you will choose your default tax and shipping charges, which will appear automatically for your products when you check the appropriate boxes.  Don’t enter these amounts again here if they are the same as your default. The only time you will enter an amount in this area is if you are charging a different sales tax or shipping charge then your default, such as if you have one item that is heavier than your other products.
• Check the box to calculate affiliate commissions if you have an affiliate program for this product.

• Skip to the fourth tab labeled “Links.”
• If you choose to specify certain URLs for your customers to be directed to during the buying process, you can do so here.  If you leave these blank, the default pages will be used.  The Destination URL is where you want to send your customers when they hit the “Continue Shopping” button in the shopping cart.  The Thank You URL is the page you want your customers to see when they make a purchase. The Clear Cart URL is the page you want your customers to go to when they hit the “Clear Cart” button in the shopping cart.
• Copy the checkout link and paste it in your website.  You have two options for your buying process and whichever one you want to use will determine which link you choose.  If you want customers to go straight from your website to the order form where they fill out their personal and payment information, you will use the “1 Step Checkout Link.” If you want customers to go to a cart page from your website, you will use the “2 Step Checkout Link.” This will send your customers to a page where they can review what is in their cart and choose to either continue shopping, checkout or clear the cart.

*Note: You will notice that there are other tabs I didn’t mention here.  The above steps are required to set up a product.  The other steps are more advanced and more detailed than I can cover in this article.  I only covered the basic steps you need to know to get your products set up.

If you have any questions or would like to learn more about setting up your1ShoppingCart account, leave a comment here or contact Superior Collaborations directly for more information.