PracticalEcommerce.com posted an excellent article on selecting your shopping cart software. In the article eight decision criteria are given for selecting a cart. These points will form the basis for this article as an indication why what you should be looking for in a shopping cart is facilitated in Magento (and of course in Magento Enterprise Edition as well).

1: SEO friendliness

Search engine friendly URLs are built into the Magento eCommerce platform by default. Additionally, you are free to provide the terms that appear in the URL, free to enter meta information for categories / products, sitemaps can be generated at set intervals, etc.

2: Coupon code support

Magento’s coupon system is highly flexible. Using Magento’s attribute system, all kinds of product attributes can be created. The coupon code system can tie into the product attributes a shop owner creates. Conditions in which a coupon applies can be combined, and number of uses per coupon, number of uses per customer, applicable time period are all options which can be set per coupon. A condition a store owner might set is “give 20% off a red t-shirt of size small from the category ‘outlet’”.

3: RSS capability

RSS functions are built into Magento by default. It is possible to have RSS feeds of new products, products for which a discount applies, and category RSS feeds.

4: Cross-selling functionality

Magento has three ways of cross-relating the product catalogue:

• Related products: these are displayed on the product page as products which can be ordered along with the main product that is being displayed.
• Cross-sells: these are products which are displayed at the shopping cart screen.
• Up-sells: these are products which are displayed on the product page as higher-priced products. Clicking on these routes the visitor to the product page of the higher priced attribute.

5: Customer reviews

Ratings and reviews are present in Magento by default. The shop manager can determine how many different kinds of ratings there are. For instance, it is possible to give your visitors the option to give star ratings for quality, speed of delivery, customer service, etc.

6: Product sharing and recommendations

In Magento, products can be sent to a friend, and products can be added to wishlists. These wishlists can also be sent to friends. On the roadmap of Magento there’s a function for creating a gift registry.

7: Multiple images, images zooming

An image zoom function is present by default in Magento. Additionally, you can upload an unlimited number of images; images are cropped to the right sizes automatically. It is relatively easy to install other presentational scripts for the media galleries.

8: Manage campaign landing pages

There is a flexible CMS system where pages and blocks can be defined. Blocks can be re-used on different pages, while pages are actual content pages. For a campaign landing page, a category page with a special CMS block can be used, or a custom CMS page can be constructed which has a unique list of products on it.

Conclusion

As PracticalEcommerce’s article showed, the primary reason to pick a shopping cart solution is the eCommerce platform offering the right solutions for marketing. Magento is a marketing machine that offers the broad range of functions needed for pulling in as many (returning) visitors as possible.