The shift towards online shopping continues on a remarkable scale. Businesses are now setting up platforms that make it easy for customers to purchase products online.
You may want to sell products on your website as well to complement offline sales. However, you don’t have to build an e-commerce shop from scratch. With shopping cart software integrated into your website, you can take orders, sell products, and process payments.
This shopping cart integration guide will teach you how to choose a shopping cart software and how to add a shopping cart to your site.
Before anything, you must understand what a shopping cart means for e-commerce. Besides, knowing how shopping software works makes it easy to navigate the integration process.
A shopping cart is a software tool that allows customers to shop for products from a website. Customers can add products they want to buy to the virtual cart, view chosen products, and make changes to their selections.
Once the customer is done selecting products, the shopping cart provides a secure ‘payments gateway’ so the customer can pay for the product. The business owner will receive an alert concerning the just-concluded purchase, after which he has to kickstart the packaging and shipping process.
Most modern shopping cart software uses HTML; although Java, ASP, and JavaScript can also be used. The simplicity of HTML is why HTML-based shopping carts are popular, as they are versatile and easy to use.
Shopping cart software comes in three types: open-source, licensed, and hosted. The difference between these three lies in their distribution, website integration process, and software updates.
In the early years of the Internet, adding a shopping cart to a site required having extensive coding knowledge. However, new-age software solutions have made turning a website into an online store a stress-free activity.
If you’re using an open-source shopping cart plug-in, you won’t have much to do. Still, you will need to create the site pages and organize the products. For instance, you might need to set up the products, payment gateway, logistics, and check-out process.
In addition, you may want to add a “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart” button to the products. Some plug-ins have this functionality while some require basic HTML knowledge to create and modify the “Buy” button.
Things are a bit different when using hosted shopping cart software. You can just build an online store using a ready-made template, choose a payment gateway, and select a shipping method.
Once you are done building the store, it’s time to connect it to your website. The first option you have is to create a subdomain for the store on the website. Say your site address is xyz.com, you could use ‘store.xyz.com’ as your online store’s address.
But you must also link the online shop with the main website to make navigation easier for consumers. This can be done by putting the store’s address (URL) on the main website menu.
If creating a subdomain sounds too complex, then you can just add the shopping cart to existing website pages or blogs. Most e-commerce solutions allow you to add products and generate a Buy Button for them.
Think “Buy Now” sounds too pedestrian? You can edit the text for the button, maybe change it to “Add to Cart”.
When customers hit the Buy or Add to Cart button, they’ll be redirected to the online store to complete the purchase.
The market for shopping cart software is crowded with many brands. Hence, selecting the right shopping cart solution can be difficult.
To make things easier, we have compiled features a good shopping cart software must have. Here they are:
Shopify is one of the most popular shopping cart software — and for good reason. Shopify has a user-friendly design, boosts conversion rates, offers multiple payment options, and provides useful sales insights and data.
For those who don’t want to create a separate store, Shopify offers a Buy Button feature that lets you add e-commerce functionality to your site. You can add an embedded shopping cart to the site and a secure checkout to make buying easier.
Here are three ways to integrate the Shopify Cart into your site so you can sell:
Integrating a shopping cart with your site will make the buying process seamless for your customers. This will boost your sales and promote better ROI, which is why we recommend it.
While shopping cart integration is important, building your e-commerce site with the right framework is important. Daalder.io provides Laravel-based e-commerce solutions that are flexible, affordable, and provide a lot of benefits for online businesses.