Accounting & Cart Integration

Shopping Carts

The arrival of the internet store where consumers can buy has generated endless business opportunities. Online businesses of all sizes can sell to customers around the world. The foundation of eCommerce website is shopping cart software. Shopping cart software has greatly evolved to include far more than a basic virtual shopping cart for your customers to add products to; it offers all the essential tools you need to manage all the facets of an eCommerce website.

Shopping cart software provides you with tools for website design, inventory control, customer management, and tax and shipping calculators. These calculators allow you to configure settings so that tax and shipping costs are automatically calculated for customers based on their location.   Additionally, most shopping cart applications help you market your site with integrated information regarding affiliate programs, social network marketing methods and online merchandising to attract more customers. Security is also an important aspect of shopping cart software. Online shoppers won’t purchase from an unsecure website, so shopping cart software provides access to reputable payment gateways as well as encryption for all information transfers.

Choosing the right shopping cart software is one of the most crucial steps to making your online business a success. Your customers need to be able to purchase your products as easily as possible, with a sense of security.  For business owners, the software should be simple to use, abounding with functionality.

Administration & Accounting Integration

Shopping cart software includes a range of administrative features that allow you to manage your store.  An administrative dashboard provides access to product upload, editing and management options.  The best shopping cart software applications allow you to upload an unlimited number of products.

Comprehensive accounting software integration controls include reports that are crucial because they give you insight into the current state of your business.  For instance, with a few mouse-clicks, you should be able to see how many units of each product you have ready to sell, while determining what was sold, to whom and at what product margin. Many times accounting integration is done via API into standard accounting software packages; some online others based in office network. You should be able to determine what accounting software and make the shopping cart and the accounting program talk to one another.

Inventory

Sales reports track how many units of each product you have sold among completed orders, while order management enables you to view and process open orders that are awaiting shipment and access real-time order tracking.  Beyond inventory control, the best shopping cart software offers comprehensive payment options and integration with accounting software.  Additionally, these applications have options that enable you to set up cross-sell and up-sell modules on your site and to offer coupons, gift certificates and special discounts to your customers.

Most shopping cart software provides basic administrative, advance accounting integration and inventory control features, such as bulk product uploading and support for both hard and soft goods.  However, these applications’ specific features and pricing structures can vary greatly between companies, so it’s important to find shopping cart software that includes your desired features at a cost-effective price.

For Johnamico.com, we created a system to match the import specs of their in-house accounting software. We then mapped all the proper data fields from their web-based shopping cart to those export files.  Our customer can log into his secure admin section and download his order files and then immediately import the data into the accounting system.  This solution made the online website and the in-house accounting completely in-sync.  The system MVI built for Johnamico.com utilizes ASP, PHP, MySQL and BWGold.