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The best online shopping cart sites are the ones that focus on the customer’s needs. When it comes to using your shopping cart site to market products your customer’s experience should be encouraging and comfortable. Force and limited offer tactics have a lower percentage of working, but a shopping experience built on customer service and additional perks keeps a customer loyal.

Magento shopping cart modules are aimed to give a customer the ability to choose their shopping experience. The only difference between actual department store shopping and virtual e-shopping is the travel. With an e-commerce site, a shopper experiences the joys of going from window to window and choosing the colors for products.

Your customer can choose several settings that provide them with what they need without any pressure of purchase. Some features of the Magento shopping cart enhance any shopper experience. Promotion features which is most used is the Wish List; this feature is for the window shoppers and the people who practice saving money for purchases. The Wish List is most often a step away from a purchase which is usually a scheduled one. Expert Internet marketing studies show a big factor for purchasing a product or a service is timing. Most people are smart buyers, needs are prioritized and credit card purchases are set at a minimum. Just because a person adds a Wish List and doesn’t purchase outright doesn’t mean no purchase will be done, this feature is a virtual goal set by the customer that will be a sale in time.

Enable the Wish List feature by going to System>Configuration then click at the Wish List tab found in the left column and select YES from the Enabled drop-down menu. Once you go back to the shopping cart you will see an Add Wish List link for all products in category pages and product pages. A shopper clicking the link to the Wish List is directed to their very own Wish List page where they can add and remove products on their shopping cart. To get to the Wish List though a customer has to register for an account and sign-in, connecting registration information to the Wish List is a must.

The Wish List page has a strip of highlighted text that names the brand and the item added to the list. An image of the item is found at the let part of the page while the middle of the page is a Comment box for the customer to fill in with personal notes. The date the item was added is shown near the button option links for Add to Cart or Remove Item. The bottom of the Wish List page has the Share Wish List, Add All to Cart and Update Wish List options. Each link directs the customer to share email or the shopping cart or the edit page of the list.

For every item an e-shopper puts in a wish list, there is an Add to Cart button that can transfer the item to the shopping cart and purchase is processed right away. Having this feature has a ripple affect since an e-shopper has an option to Share Wish List. The Share Wish List is an effective word of mouth promotion of your products and services.

Participation is spread since a customer endorses a product via Share Wish List email. The sharing feature informs customers’ husbands, boyfriends, girlfriends, partners, friends and relatives what they would want for a gift. One thing I like about the Wish List feature is that a customer has a choice of what template to use for a Share Wish List email. Nicely presented as a nicely designed web page mail which shows the item and the comments the sharer has typed.

An effective shopping experience is one done in a site that has friendly service and promises to be there when they come back.

Having an online store is one way to reach customers for your products worldwide. The boom of e-commerce sites are because of the diverse visits your site gets which lead to revenue. Where there is revenue there is profit and there is also the potential of your income generating site to be defrauded. Fraudulent purchases have reportedly cost e-commerce merchants over $4 billion in 2008 alone. The culprit is what they call “chargebacks” which is defined as any card payment that the card holder returns to the merchant bank.

Let’s say my credit card number is entered for a solar powered watch which costs $555 + shipping fee to Tahiti. The charge goes through the site owners shopping cart software billing, once processed my card receives the credit of the amount currency of the transaction. The my credit card company then debits the amount from the merchant bank account of the Solar watch merchant, responsibility is assumed by the merchant or the shopping cart site owner. It so happens that I live in the UK and haven’t even made the purchase and it was established that my credit card information was stolen and used without my authorization. The site selling the solar powered watch then has to concede and have the currency amount charged to their account – in most cases they also lose the product that is delivered too.

Charge backs happen, but the frequency of this happening and the causes can be lessened if not avoided. For our Magento shopping carts, a downloadable plug-in called the Algozone Fraud Screening Service. Depending on a business site, there are AFS modules for small, medium and large business sites.

With an AFS enabled shopping cart, fraud screening process starts at the time a customer places an order, the IP address is recorded as well as several information a customer types in the fields. This information goes through the AlgoZone servers and is used to detect which transactions are fraudulent.

Though the AFS provides a reading on the transaction information, the site owner has the final say in processing the purchase. To see the AFS report and recommendation, the site owner goes to Admin > order review screen to check out the order details of a customer. Fraud levels are shown in a table which would show the AFS results for the transaction on the upper left. Low risk fraud level is from 0.01, as the risk level gets higher the more questionable the information was typed in the purchase form.

Fraud levels are determined using the following information given during the purchase process:

Mail domain – most often fraud is done using a free email address. Since the domain is free, information to register for one can be bogus too.

Email – a cross check for emails of known “carders” (credit card fraudster)

Geographic source – IP addresses of the computer used in the transaction most often should match the country IP address specified in the billing address.

Proxy – there are IP addresses that register as anonymous, usually there is a program that prevents for an IP address to be displayed.

Open Proxy – IP address checks out to be an open proxy

Spam – Spam source IP’s are often recorded, IP addresses are checked against a list.

BIN – this number is associated to the IP address of the bank where the credit card is issued

Another fail – safe confirmation of a transactions is making a contact number a required field to be filled up in every form. A fraud level that scores in the middle range can always be confirmed via phone.

A business is hard work and cunning, getting a fraud screening plug-in lessens putting your e-commerce site at risk for carders.