Businesses and consumers alike have their eyes on ecommerce. If you are aware that online shopping and the capability to purchase goods from different channels will likely increase in the coming years, then you are searching for a shopping cart application.
If you want to take advantage of this change in behavior of buyers, you have to be able to process payments on the Internet. A shopping cart software program can be utilized to accomplish that.
What is Shopping Cart Software?
Shopping cart software serves as the driving force for an online store, allowing the easy oversight of inventory, the ability to add or remove items, calculation of taxes, as well as other necessary aspects of running a website and fulfilling requests.
But many online shopping carts do even more than that, like:
- Allow customers to add promo codes and special discounts, or auto-apply them based on loyalty status
- Check out using different payment methods and payment models (e.g., subscription, ‘buy now, pay later,’ etc.)
- Collect and transmit relevant customer data to other business systems (accounting, CRM, email marketing and more) while helping retain compliance with data regulations like GDPR
Shopping cart software can make complicated tasks easy to deal with by providing a user-friendly interface that allows even those without any technical knowledge to fully control an online commerce business.
2 Main Types of Shopping Cart Software
Merchants of today feature an extensive range of skills, and each e-commerce platform possesses different characteristics and practical uses. Shopping cart software has various distinguishing features, and one of them is the platform where your store is going to be hosted – commonly referred to as web hosting. This will drastically change the way that your e-commerce site is built, operated, and kept up for the long run.
Hosted shopping carts.
Hosted shopping carts are provided by an ecommerce service provider, just like a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The vendors are responsible for managing, upgrading, and keeping these carts up to date. For either a yearly or monthly cost, you are granted access to all the vendor’s essential commerce elements, in addition to hosting services for your online presence, bandwidth, supervised safety protocols, and ongoing software improvements.
Software as a Service (SaaS) offers a wonderful compromise between adaptability and convenience. You don’t need to take many months creating all the desired attributes. Shopping cart software that is hosted over the web has developed to the point where users can now enjoy the freedom and adaptability that was previously exclusive to programs that are kept locally-held, making it an appropriate option for the majority of online stores.
Some of the popular providers of hosted ecommerce shopping carts are:
- BigCommerce
- Shift4Shop
- Shopify
Self-hosted shopping carts.
Merchants need to either host their site on their own or use a hosting service through their platform provider if they choose an open-source or self-hosted e-commerce platform. It also requires more hands-on development experience.
Frequently given out for free as open-source programs, these carts provide the basic features for checkout processes. Additional features and connections with other programs will need to be created or acquired via an outside source that requires payment.
By hosting your online store on open source software, you have nearly unlimited control of the entire shopping adventure. It is essential to dedicate more time to the technological side of your ecommerce venture, as opposed to the operational side.
8 Shopping Cart Software Features You Need
When you are trying to decide between a SaaS ecommerce solution and a self-hosted shopping cart product, ensure that both possibilities fulfill the four following conditions.
Secure and PCI compliant.
Hackers are strongly drawn to online stores, especially given the rise of online shopping due to the pandemic situation.
U.S. consumers have been defrauded out of more than $35.07 million stemming from coronavirus-related scams since the beginning of the year.
The security of the shopping cart is of utmost importance as it is used to handle confidential customer information. When assessing different types of shopping cart solutions, ensure that it has:
- PCI-DSS compliance. This is a globally-recognized standard for securely processing payments. Vendors pass rigorous testing to earn this status.
- SSL/HTTPS support. A SSL certificate is a ‘must’ standard for encrypting sensitive data a buyer provides to your shopping solution during checkout.
- Anti-fraud and data security tools. Make sure you can monitor suspicious user activity and block potentially fraudulent transactions and brute force intrusion attempts either natively or using an integrated third-party system.
Mobile-ready.
It was expected that mobile commerce would result in $314 billion being brought in during 2020, accounting for 44% of all ecommerce sales. If you do not provide a checkout that can be easily used on a mobile device, you could be restricting your potential for increasing your business.
Choose a shopping cart that allows you to create an easy and fast mobile check-out process. Consider reducing the number of data fields, making the buttons larger, and incorporating well-known mobile payment services like Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Amazon Pay, and so on.
Customizable.
Customer experience is currently a major competition between ecommerce companies. It is estimated that the CX management market will be worth $14.9 billion by 2025; which is double what it is currently projected to be in the coming years. Your shopping cart software should not interfere with providing customers with a cohesive and unified online shopping experience. Assess each option from the perspective of customization:
- Can we change the checkout flow or interface design to better match our business needs?
- How many elements of the overall store design can we customize? Are the templates flexible?
- Do we need a coding team for quick updates or is there a drag-and-drop builder available?
- What about integrations? How easily can we integrate into existing systems and business tools?
- What existing development resources will we have access to?
Easy to update.
Over time, your performance needs may shift. Security requirements may change. Therefore, it is essential to constantly patch and update open-source solutions. This is almost always done manually by developers.
The vendor takes care of all updates to the hosted shopping cart automatically. In the majority of circumstances, you don’t have to take any initiatives or repeat the test. You may have to set up any newly added features before you can start using them.
Tax Calculations
Every ordering process records the cumulative amount of products Sally has added to her shopping basket. Once Sally puts in her home address, the program can work out what her taxes are.
When calculating taxes for shoppers who are located in the same state or city that the merchant is in, find the applicable sales tax percentage in a look-up table organized by tax jurisdiction. All carts do this adequately. Carts that are more advanced allow the calculation of taxes based on ZIP codes, allowing them to accurately collect taxes from places like New York where they require merchants to pay by the rate in each county or other districts.
What are the implications of having physical store locations in 15 different states? Nowadays, cutting-edge software can be enhanced with TaxWare’s Sales/Use Tax System (available at www.taxware.com) or CertiTax (www.esalestax.com/products.htm) to accurately calculate taxes in the United States and Canada instantaneously.
Presently, more than thirty-five states are coming together in an effort to simplify the collection of sales taxes and persuade the US Congress to pass a law requiring larger stores (believed to be stores with a yearly revenue of over one million dollars) to collect and remit sales taxes from all participating states. If you engage in a lot of commercial activities on the internet, verify that your program permits inserting a tax module. At the moment, the law suggests that smaller companies would not need to abide by the requirement, so any register system is probably suitable for tax calculation.
Be aware that if you are shipping to Europe, the European Union requires foreign merchants to calculate and give Value-Added Tax. It is as yet uncertain what consequences this will have for vendors not situated in the European Union.
Shipping Calculations
Recently, the process of determining the cost of sending goods by mail has become much more advanced. All up-to-date carts include two types of shipping calculations:
- Calculations from look-up tables set up by the merchant.
- Real-time calculations that pull information from major shippers and couriers.
If you come across a shopping trolley which doesn’t allow UPS delivery costs to be calculated, it’s likely it is not being regularly supported. Even if you do not require UPS delivery, this can still be used as a reliable measure of how current the shopping cart is. Steer clear of shopping carts that don’t give you this, even if they appear to cost less.
Stating that, merchants can effectively use lookup tables to get the shipping fees. The cost for shipping may not be exactly the same as the expense of your table setting, but it will amount to the same in the end. Carts often include a wide variety of shipping calculations, such as:
- By sales total
- By weight
- By number of items in the order
- By weight and zone
- A fixed shipping price for all products
In general, you have to pick one system to use for all of your goods, although a lot of carts permit you to include a shipping charge on some of the items which are really large or appropriate crates or transportation vessels must be employed. Some merchants find it most convenient to use a system of weighing items, particularly if they deal in multiple items of varying sizes and forms.
If you carry out a lot of shipping, it will be useful to use the plug-ins that the bigger shippers offer. These services provide online merchants with an estimation of shipping costs depending on the type of delivery chosen (e.g. overnight, two days, ground, etc.). Typically, the merchant must register with each shipping carrier to take advantage of this complimentary service. Retailers can usually confine the delivery options they present to shoppers, even if the carrier provides other options.
- UPS
- FedEx
- DHL
- US Postal Service
- CanadaPost
- Australia Post
It appears that Royal Mail (UK) does not offer this service at the present time. Not all carts have the capability to charge a fee (covering expenses such as postage) on top of the predicted shipping cost. However, some do.
Identifying Shoppers on a Return Visit
Priority for the dealer is to document clients’ names and contact information more so than any other purchasing quantity. Better software products keep an online database of customers. When a customer is prepared to make another purchase (or visit a website that relies on stored information), a cookie on the browser will recognize them as someone who has bought from them before and generally remember their name. Some of these database-energized sites are able to personalize contact with customers, such as:
- E-mailing information about sales and special offers
- Providing filled-in billing and shipping address preferences (though usually not one’s credit card number)
- Presenting the shopper with offers and product recommendations based on previous purchases or items placed in the shopping cart
- Allowing customer login access to past order history, current order status, package tracking, etc.
You won’t discover complex customization tools with less expensive shopping carts, however a customer sign-in ability has become pretty widespread.
Product Databases
Most carts have an online record which at least contains the SKU, title of the product, total weight, and cost. However, one of the most essential shopping carts at the lower end of the spectrum, PayPal, does not make use of an online database. All information concerning the product is embedded in the HTML “order” button. When a customer selects the purchase option, the item details are sent to PayPal to start a payment.
The danger of this approach is fraud. It is quite possible for an unscrupulous shopper to copy your product webpage, and do one of two things:
- Change the price encoded into the order button. Then click on the altered order button. You may not even notice the price change and deliver the product at a substantial “discount.”
- Observe the URL of the thank you or download page where an electronically delivered product is delivered and go there to download the item without bothering to pay at all.
You can address these issues by formatting the webpage HTML or by using PayPal’s Instant Payment Notification so the product is not available until the payment is obtained. Sending the download code via e-mail only when the payment has been confirmed. I use PayPal as an alternate way to offer my goods without running into any of these troubles. The most common way that shopping carts ward off these dilemmas is by incorporating an online database that is protected from any intruders and has all the product and price details.
3 Best Ecommerce Shopping Cart Solutions
We have put together a selection of ecommerce business owner endorsed shopping cart solutions, ranging from self-hosted to SaaS alternatives, that are generally deemed satisfactory.
BigCommerce.
BigCommerce offers Software as a Service, with a comprehensive platform containing a hosted shopping cart, website builder with drag-and-drop capabilities, store management resources, integrations with famous iterations of business systems, and app templates that can be utilized right away.
WooCommerce.
WooCommerce is an extensively used, self-run web shopping platform for WordPress sites. Automattic, the creators of WooCommerce, keep it up-to-date and provide a reasonable set of basic shopping features for payment.
Shopify.
Shopify is a web hosting service tailored toward smaller businesses which sell goods to consumers.
Shopify makes it easy to construct a store with minimal effort and standard features. This makes the setup and store management part easy. You can easily set up integrations with popular marketing programs such as Google Analytics and Smile.io with one click. Some non-native tools require a separate subscription.
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