Choosing a shopping cart for your coaching business can be difficult and confusing with so many options out there. While there are plenty of great shopping cart services to choose from many coaches don't realize that there are ways to get around having to use one, and plenty of reasons why you don't need one.
Choosing the right shopping cart for your coaching business is important because many of them don't just take payments and collect customer information but will also manage your mailing list, or at least keep a mailing list for customers that have purchased from you. This is very useful, but can be redundant if you already maintain a separate newsletter list, and annoying if you have to always copy and paste email addresses between one service and another.
Changing who your email list is hosted with is also a pain, requiring your customers to re-opt in, or you having to jump through hoops in order to bypass this annoyance and not lose a percentage of your list. So once you make your choice for a newsletter provider (or shopping cart with newsletter capabilities), it's generally easier just to stick with it, even if it's inconvenient.
So how do you get away with not using a shopping cart, but still make sales and keep track of your customers? You skip the middle man and integrate your payment service directly with your newsletter service.
All that your shopping cart does is create a way for you to host your products and process your payments through a service like PayPal, or your merchant account. What you may not realize is, some of the top newsletter services (such as AWeber, which is the service I use and recommend) have the ability to directly interface with these same payment systems through an email parser.
So essentially you just put your "buy now" button on your website, a customer clicks it, goes through the normal check out process and when they hit the submit button not only is the payment processed, but they are subscribed to a specific autoresponder dedicated to that product (and it's possible to automagically add them to your newsletter as well) all for an extra zero dollars a month. How cool is that?
This work around is really only worth it if you're selling a few products or coaching packages on your website. The reason being you have to link each product individually to an autoresponder which can be time consuming initially. However, if you're like most coaches and are mostly selling a couple of coaching packages and teleseminars this is a great way to save yourself some money on a shopping cart, and save time adding customers to your newsletter list.
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