It's important to become familiar with all your internet shopping cart features to avoid leaving money on the table. Two lesser know methods involve using reports and bundle offers to maximize your sales. First off, let's see how internet shopping cart reports can save you money and make you money. Here are three examples: Filter Sales By Customer If your shopping cart software allows you to filter the database according to client, you will be able to see where most of your sales are coming from. The report should give you the volume of sales from each client to enable you to target or give special attention to the top clients on the list, perhaps offering special discounts for bulk orders. Filter Sales By Date Use this feature to see if there are specific times in the year when sales volume dramatically increases. You may have a general idea and know which month(s) are the peak sales months. However, by using a Sales By Date feature you can pinpoint specific times in the year you may not be aware of where sales volume is higher than normal, especially if those times are spread over just one or two weeks. Increase advertising dollars and promotions accordingly at those times and bring in even more sales. Filter Sales By Credit Card Do you know which credit cards most of your customers are using? Probably Visa or Mastercard. What about other credit cards such as Discover, American Express, Diner's Club, Delta? What are your merchant account charges for those other cards? The Sales By Credit Card feature helps you to see whether it is even worth it to have a particular credit card in your system after analyzing where most of the sales are coming from. If it's not, drop the uneconomical ones and save money. This brief exercise has shown the importance of making sure the internet shopping cart software you are considering has a comprehensive reports feature. Now we will turn our attention to another way you can increase sales and make more money from your internet shopping cart. It involves bundle offers. An internet shopping cart setup can learn much from the bricks and mortar world. McDonald's do it with their Happy Meal. Travel agents do it with their package deals. What are we talking about? Bundle offers or the upsell - an amazingly simple way to increase sales value and revenue yet so under-developed in many internet shopping carts. Once a customer has already committed themselves to buying you simply add on related items and increase the value. If for example you are selling exercise equipment, exercise clothing, or body care products could be put together with the original purchase at a discount price to make a Bundle Offer. Top internet shopping cart systems have this feature integrated into the package with clear instructions for setup. Once the client gets to the page that reviews the contents of the shopping cart, the Bundle Offer can appear. Then with one click the client can choose to add-on the bonus items. Push Without Being Pushy Carefully choose the wording when describing the Bundle Offer to avoid coming over too pushy which may turn clients off. Don't just make a slashed price offer. Be sure to emphasise the benefits to the user as well. For example, "Enjoy a refreshing, invigorating shower after your workout with our exercise equipment, with the all natural, herbal shower gel (brand name). A pack of 5 can be shipped with your order for an additional $." When choosing an internet shopping cart, make sure you have this facility so you don't leave money on the table. The beauty of this is that bundle offers don't really require much extra effort yet they can produce substantial sales over the months. Seeing the customer has just made a purchase they are already in a buying mindset. The second purchase is much easier! Copyright (c) 2009 Michael A Jones
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