
// Development
How to Build a Shopping Cart Website?
// Development
It is better to sell goods on the Internet using an online shopping cart - it is much more convenient for buyers, as well as much easier and cheaper for sellers than placing orders via phone or email (as they did before). In this article, we will discuss various solutions that you can use to create such an online shopping cart and integrate it into your e-commerce platform.
Like a cash register in a conventional store, the online shopping cart software of a website includes the side facing the customer and the side facing the business (its employees). The shopper side is commonly referred to as a user interface or showcase. Its functionality usually includes both the shopping cart itself and the entire store site.
The business-oriented side is usually referred to as the back-end or admin. It includes software for placing orders and an administrator control panel, through which employees of the online platform, among other things, manage the online shopping cart and orders.
Together, the user interface and the back-end of the software allow customers to place orders for the purchase of goods and services in the store, and you can process these orders. At the same time, depending on the complexity of such software, the shopping cart can be relatively simple: drawing up a list of orders and displaying it, for example, in the form of a table, for subsequent processing by employees. Or very complex, the functionality of which will include the following features:
SaaS solutions. This is software that is delivered as a single service (shopping cart itself + hosting + website + support). You buy a subscription, do a little setup and you're ready to go. The best option for a quick start and for those who do not want to think about shopping cart development, hosting and maintenance. But you need to understand that in the medium and long term this is not the best solution, since it is cheaper to pay the developer once than to give the SaaS provider $ 30-500 every month.
The most popular SaaS to create a shopping cart:
Here is a comparison of the most popular open source software solutions for building / integrating a website shopping cart:
AspDotNetStorefront, Cubecart, Joomla Ecommerce, Miva Merchant, nopCommerce, ProductCart, Satchmo eCommerce, TomatoCart, Drupal Commerce, Virtuemart, Softslate, SpreeCommerce, Jadasite, Sylius, ZenCart, SunShop, WordPress eCommerce and X-Cart are also popular. To create a shopping cart based on these solutions for your own site, you will need a development team.
Licensed software. These are e-commerce platforms that you host on your own servers or in a purchased hosting. Typically, you pay for it once and then use it as you see fit. Sometimes you also need to pay for updates, plugins, features - individually or for all at once. In this case, usually you buy not just software for creating / integrating a shopping cart of a website, but a complex platform for launching commercial projects.
Here are some examples:
Here are some popular enterprise-grade shopping carts:
Here are some popular plugins:
According to Statista, the average cart abandonment rate across all industries is 70%, mobile is 85%. The main reasons for abandonment are additional shipping / tax costs, registration requirements, and long and complicated ordering. If we remove these and a number of other problems, the number of failures can be reduced by 35%. Here's how to do it:
Don't automatically redirect buyers to the checkout page. When users add a product or service to their cart, don't send them straight to the checkout page, as most of these cases people want to choose something else, and the automatic redirection to the cart makes them make unnecessary movements, which is annoying. Let your users add as many items to their cart as they want. When they are ready, they will be taken to the checkout page themselves.
Offer options "Save for later" and "Add to favorites". Another practice that aims to keep hesitant users. Its essence is that instead of refusing here and now, postpone the decision to buy until later, when customers are ready to buy or they have money.