Each e-commerce site needs a shopping basket that fits its business goals and user preferences. For online retailers, shopping cart desertion is a major risk.

E-commerce stores should design carts to reduce this issue. This is possible with the right shopping cart solution. Given the many choices available, how do you choose the best shopping software? We'll look at some of the best options for shopping carts and how you can choose the right one for your ecommerce business.

developing e commerce solutions with shopping carts

What Is The Purpose And Importance Of A Shopping Cart?

What Is The Purpose And Importance Of A Shopping Cart?

Shopping carts are software solutions that help customers purchase on an ecommerce website. The shopping cart is responsible for processing the customer's payment and sending the payment details to all parties involved in the process.

This includes the merchant, the payment processor, and others. Shopping carts make it simpler to transition between exploratory activities like product browsing and real purchases.

Imagine the number of millions of products customers browsed through in an online shop compared to the products and services they purchased.

The browsing and shopping activities are non-committal, but the actual purchases, which are far fewer, give the ecommerce store real business. Shopping carts are the key to converting browsing into sales. This is why quality shopping cart software can be crucial.

A shopping cart can also do the following things:

  • Stores product information.
  • It works like a portal for managing orders and product catalogs, as well as customers.
  • Displays information about products, categories of products, and websites for users.

A shopping cart for e-commerce does more than just help you transport items. The shelves that hold the products are also included, as are the clearance counter, cash register, and payment processing system.

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Why Do You Need Shopping Cart Software?

Why Do You Need Shopping Cart Software?

Accepting transactions is essential if you plan to launch an ecommerce company. In the early days of ecommerce, developers had to create bespoke software for each store.

Today, a large range of software supports secure online transactions. It has various features and capabilities, including plugins that can add commerce functionality to an existing website.

Your shopping cart may have additional features that you want to use:

  • Simplify Marketing: With built-in SEO (search engine optimization), email marketing, and simple mobile optimization, online shops may rank higher in organic search results and gain more potential customers at reduced acquisition costs.
  • Automate Taxes And Shipping: Some software solutions for shopping carts can print shipping labels, calculate sales taxes according to customer location and send notification emails.
  • Manage Products: Shopping cart software lets online store managers get a high-level view of products or drill down into the details without having any technical knowledge.
  • Manage Orders And Customer Information: Managing an order from the moment it is placed to its delivery is essential to any business's success.

    You can filter customers, check orders' status, and make real-time changes with shopping cart software.

    Email platforms can be integrated to provide a second medium for managing customer communication.

  • Integrate Your Back-End Systems: If you have a brick-and-mortar operation, you can combine data from the point-of-sale system and an online storefront to get a comprehensive view of customer shopping behavior and inventory.

    You can use the insights gained to personalize marketing and boost customer loyalty.

  • Stay Compliant: Maintain your financial data in a neat stack for audits.

    Minimize compliance risks related to non-secure payment methods or data misuse per regulations such as GDPR.

  • Enable Additional Features: Most E-commerce solution include features such as checkout and native and third-party options, including cart abandonment recovery and discounts, and various pre-built or custom integrations.

Shopping Cart Software: Types And Applications

Shopping Cart Software: Types And Applications

Vendors today offer a wide range of capabilities. Each shopping cart software will have different modules, features, and functionality.

Web hosting is a major difference between the different types of shopping carts. It can significantly impact how your online shop is set up, managed, and maintained over time.

SaaS-Based Shopping Cart Software

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) shopping carts are owned, maintained, and upgraded by an ecommerce vendor. You can pay an annual or monthly subscription fee to access the vendor's core features.

This includes hosting, bandwidth, security, and software upgrades. SaaS solutions strike a balance between ease of use and flexibility. The SaaS solutions have evolved so much that they now offer customization and flexibility, previously only available on-premise.

This is more than enough for the majority of online retailers.

Open Source Shopping Cart

Open-source shopping baskets require merchants to host their sites themselves or via a platform provider. These carts are often distributed as free, open-source software and provide basic checkout functionality.

Additional functionality and integrations must either be developed by third parties or purchased through a subscription.

The open-source software you host yourself can provide almost limitless flexibility in the shopping experience. This also means that you will have to spend more time on the technical aspects of your business rather than the operational ones.

Open-source shopping carts can be found from the following providers:

  • WooCommerce.
  • PrestaShop.
  • OpenCart.
  • Adobe Magento.
  • WordPress.
  • X-Cart.

The Features Of Shopping Cart Software You Need

The Features Of Shopping Cart Software You Need

If you're looking for an ecommerce product hosted on your own server or a SaaS solution, be sure to check out the following features.

Robust Discount Features

In the past year, 92% of US shoppers use coupons at least once, and 45% always or often. Modern businesses must choose shopping cart software with discounting capabilities.

You can promote different offers, such as product discounts or BOGO deals. Discounts on the digital market are a great way to increase sales and establish customer relationships.

Security And PCI Compliance

Hackers are attracted to online stores, and their move towards shopping online during pandemics made them even more appealing.

Since the beginning of 2020, American online shoppers have lost more than $800 million due to COVID fraud.

A shopping cart must be secured because it is used to process sensitive customer data. You should look for the following features when evaluating different shopping cart solutions:

  • PCI DSS Compliance: This standard is globally recognized for the secure processing of payments.

    Vendors must pass rigorous tests to achieve this status.

  • SSL/HTTPS Support: An SSL certificate is essential for encrypting sensitive information a buyer supplies to your shopping solution at checkout.
  • Tools For Data Security And Anti-Fraud: Ensure you can monitor suspicious activity, block potentially fraudulent transactions, and stop brute-force intrusion attempts.

Abandoned Cart Functionality

Nearly 80% of shopping carts will be abandoned online. Businesses lose a lot of money every year. A solution that includes an abandoned cart saver will help reduce the impact on revenue.

Automated abandoned cart recovery sends customizable emails to customers who leave the checkout process to remind them to return and purchase items they added to their basket. You can customize these emails with the right solution to tailor your message for each customer.

Mobile-Ready

In 2025, mobile commerce will generate more than $710 Billion in sales 21,9% of all retail sales. You could hurt your growth potential if you don't provide a mobile-friendly experience at the checkout.

Choose a shopping cart that allows you to create a simplified mobile checkout process. Consider fewer fields, bigger buttons, and the integration of popular mobile payments such as Apple Pay or Google Pay.

Calculation Of Tax And Shipping

Software solutions can find it difficult to calculate shipping costs, especially since costs have increased due to concerns about the supply chain in recent years.

If you are looking for shopping cart software, look for a solution that includes the following:

  • Calculations from tables created by different merchants.
  • Calculations in real-time based on data pulled from major shipping companies and couriers.

As a business grows, so will its tax calculations. Taxes are relatively easy to handle when you're working in one state.

But what if there are ten? Multiple countries? You can save time and expand your reach by using shopping cart software that includes an automatic tax and shipping calculation.

Payment Gateway Options

You must choose a solution that can be used with all popular payment methods, such as Apple Pay, Amazon Pay, PayPal, and Stripe.

You can reach a wider range of clients with a large selection of payment gateways. Make sure that your online payment solution works seamlessly on mobile devices. Not having this option available is a mistake, as mobile shopping will become more popular.

The latest digital wallets will allow you to streamline your process even more.

Also Read: Developing E-commerce Solutions with Payment Gateways

Inventory Management

A shopping cart with an inventory management system can save you significant time in the backend. Imagine that instead of manually counting and subtracting your inventory every time you make a sale, a program could alert you by email or notification whenever a threshold for low inventory is reached, or an item has been completely sold out.

It will relieve stress and let customers know through real-time tracking if the item they want to buy is still in stock before payment.

Customizable

The customer experience (CX), also known as the "customer journey," has become a major battleground for ecommerce platforms.

By 2025, the market for CX management is expected to reach $14.9 billion approx. In order to give customers a consistent online experience, shopping cart software shouldn't be a hindrance.

Updates Are Easy To Make

Your performance requirements and security needs can change over time. Open-source solutions are especially in need of regular patching and updating, which is usually done manually by dedicated ecommerce developers.

The vendor automatically performs updates when you use a hosted shopping basket. You don't need to do anything yourself or even retest. You may have to configure new features to use them.

What Are The Main Options For Shopping Cart Development?

What Are The Main Options For Shopping Cart Development?

We will examine the options available before discussing custom shopping carts and their rules and practices. Shopping carts can be divided into two main categories:

Shopping Cart Development - Hosted Or Generic

Hosted shopping carts are those where a third-party service provider hosts, maintains, and upgrades the shopping cart and performs server backups.

This type of solution has the advantage that it doesn't cost anything to host a shopping cart. This solution is the best if you are primarily concerned about shopping cart development costs. Customers will have to visit a separate website to make their payment.

We'll look into the pros and cons of hosted shopping carts.

Pros

  • The cost of running an online store has not increased.
  • This is a simple solution to integrate a shopping basket without too much complexity.
  • The shopping cart is designed for those who have limited technical expertise.

Cons

  • This type of shopping cart is a one-size-fits-all solution that may not be appropriate for custom ecommerce websites.
  • Customers must visit a separate website to process payments when using hosted shopping carts.

    This can be a bit cumbersome for the user.

  • Hosted shopping carts are limited in their flexibility and the scope of added value.

    Carts lack many features, and they are not compatible with third-party add-ons.

Custom Or Licensed Shopping Cart Design

A business owner creates a custom or licensed cart to customize it and meet their specific needs and preferences.

This type of cart is more flexible and allows for third-party additions.

Check out these pros and cons for custom shopping carts.

Pros

  • Greater customization is possible with bespoke shopping carts, which is perfect for developing custom ecommerce web development.
  • Custom shopping carts can help improve the customer experience by addressing business needs and preferences.

    This will increase conversion and business.

  • Custom shopping carts allow you to add third-party tools to enhance customer experience.

Cons

  • A custom-made shopping cart costs more than the price of ready-made solutions.
  • Custom carts are less likely to be developed correctly than ready-made carts because a few people only test them.

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What Is The Best Shopping Cart Software?

What Is The Best Shopping Cart Software?

Let's now focus on the needs of your business. How can you choose a shopping cart software to help your business grow, not hinder it? You can find out by following these steps:

Decide What You Want To Achieve With Your Online Store

It can be difficult to decide to sell online. You don't want to proceed until you know all the operational details.

Start with the "why?" Why are you interested in selling online? Are you looking to increase your business? What is your plan?

  • Will you use Ecommerce Software as a way to sell directly to consumers?
  • Want to increase your brick-and-mortar business's online presence?

Think about ecommerce metrics in addition to the baseline goals.

  • How will you measure the growth you hope to achieve after your launch?
  • Are you planning to sell locally or internationally?
  • What is your plan to increase the lifetime value of a customer?
  • How many products are you planning to sell?

Select The Features That You Need

Create a list based on the metrics and goals you have set. They should be aligned closely with your customer's lifecycle, as features can significantly impact pricing.

You can start by determining your desired features and then narrow your search.

  1. List the essentials.

    Does it, for example, support the payment gateway you prefer?

  2. Add any extras you need, like automatic shipping rates and sales tax calculations.
  3. Prioritize the nice-to-haves in order of importance, where 1 is an essential feature that will drive revenues, and 5 is an add-on that could improve your daily operations.

Choose Whether You Want A Saas-Based Shopping Cart Or A Self-Hosted One

Hosted (SaaS) and self-hosted shopping carts (open source) have advantages. Each choice comes with its compromises.

Custom ecommerce site development and open-source ecommerce software can come with additional risks. SaaS solutions, on the other hand, are less customizable because not all vendors allow you to edit the CSS/HTML of the checkout or front-end design.

Although many platforms allow for design changes, they won't let you modify the solution's source code. This limits your ability to customize functionality.

You may need to buy extra apps in the app store of your vendor to connect marketing tools or order-management functionality. If you need something specific, look at the options for custom development through APIs.

Test The Ease Of Use

Checkout is an important step in conversion. 80% of carts are abandoned. Your goal is to reduce friction. Check that the solution is easy to use.

Baymard Institute conducts an ongoing assessment of the ecommerce UX check-out and stresses the importance of adhering to these best practices.

  • Provide a prominent "Guest Checkout" option.
  • A comparison of shipping options should be displayed.
  • Users can edit data directly in the order review stage.
  • The required and optional fields must be marked.

These points can be used to determine how well your top choices performed. Check if you can customize the checkout settings and copy to reduce cart abandonment.

Review Customer Service

It's handy to have a support development team that is easily accessible because there will be a time when you or your team cannot answer a question.

When a crucial part of your site fails, your team doesn't want to spend hours reading technical documentation to find answers. SaaS solutions often offer 24/7 technical assistance and quickly respond to critical issues. Many vendors do not offer fast response times and multiple support channels.

Be sure to compare them with other vendors.

How Can You Convince Your Customers To Complete The Purchase?

How Can You Convince Your Customers To Complete The Purchase?

For a number of reasons, customers remove items from their shopping carts. They may go to another competitor's site to get a better deal or to benefit from a special offer.

It is not uncommon for customers to abandon their carts and purchase from another website. A study reports that more than 80% of e-commerce shops believe abandoned shopping carts will never be found, and it is pointless to pursue customers who abandon their carts.

Customers often leave their carts empty but intend to return them.

It is now important to know how to convince customers to return to an ecommerce store and complete a purchase. eCommerce shopping carts are incomplete without features like "Add to Wishlist," "Save Cart," or "Add to Wishlist," as these can be used to communicate with customers.

E-commerce stores can inform customers about promotions, limited-time deals, and similar products. By using discounts and special offers, the "Save Cart" feature helps the store to contact customers.

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The Most Effective Tips For Custom Shopping Cart Design And Development

The Most Effective Tips For Custom Shopping Cart Design And Development

Custom shopping carts require both a custom design and a feature set. We will explain the design and development guidelines for custom shopping baskets in an online shop.

Let's begin with some basic design steps and tips:

  • Consider the benefits of customizing the design to meet your shop's needs instead of using the CMS default.

    You can always make changes or add new elements.

  • The "Background Graphic," the "Background Color," or the "Header Graphic design" can be tweaked one at a time to create your desired shopping cart design.
  • You can select custom images or thumbnails for specific products by going to the Product Tab.
  • Add a brief and compelling description to every product.

Shopping Cart Development And Design: Key Parameters You Should Consider

You must consider certain factors when building a shopping basket to get the best performance and user experience.

  • Cart Opening Speed- The cart's opening speed is critical to performance and user satisfaction.

    Ideally, the shopping cart should open and close in milliseconds.

    You should prioritize loading speed, as most customers will leave your store if it takes too long to load.

  • Use Local Currency- While USD is the default currency in any shopping cart, you should always allow local currency to be used.

    The local currency is a great way to save on taxes, shipping, and products.

  • Product Shipping Options- As the shipping of your products is one of those areas that can affect conversion rates, and it's important to provide multiple shipping options for customers to choose from.

    The more shipping options you offer, the greater the confidence of your customers.

What A Customized Shopping Cart Can Do For Your Business

What A Customized Shopping Cart Can Do For Your Business

Let's look deeper at the differences between a custom shopping cart and a generic one. A custom shopping cart can improve user experience and increase sales.

Custom shopping carts can require a lot of development, testing, and a large budget. A generic version is a great alternative.

Custom shopping carts offer a wide range of benefits regarding increased engagement and business conversion. Generic carts lack the essential elements to transform businesses into modern ecommerce web stores.

  • Unique Experience- A shopping cart with a custom design is made specifically for a select audience.

    Design decisions are made based on the features and functions the online store must provide its customers.

    The design should be unique and make it easy to browse products.

  • Flexible Product Listing- Product list customization is not possible with generic carts, which is one of its drawbacks.

    A generic cart, for example, may not allow you to list unlimited products under a particular filter like category or price.

    A custom cart, however, can list any number of products under any category or filter.

  • Running Special Promo- When your store opts for a custom shopping cart design, you can list special offers and promotions on a separate webpage.

    Listing products on a promotional page will boost sales and conversion.

  • Enhanced Control- Generic Carts are usually hosted on a remote server that the hosting company controls.

    It means that access and control are limited.

    You also need to depend on the security settings that a server can have, which may be vulnerable.

    Customized shopping carts give you total control over all records and data.

    You can also configure security settings as you have full control over the root database and source code.

  • Faster Integration Of Changes- When you want to make changes to a generic shopping cart, you only have to change the templates on both the client and server sides.

    The process becomes complex and lengthy.

    On the other hand, custom shopping carts can be easily modified and changed to suit your needs.

  • Scalability Increased- A generic shopping cart is not scalable enough to grow with your online business.

    Your e-commerce company will grow, and you'll need to use a cart with limited capacity.

    On the other hand, a custom cart offers maximum scalability to adapt to increased traffic or business queries.

  • Marketing- Generic Carts do not offer any special marketing features.

    Customized shopping carts offer many features that can help promote and market products.

    To increase traffic from search engine results, the e-commerce site can include SEO tags for all pages and products listed.

  • Extensive Pricing Options- With the generic shopping cart, you have only pre-configured fixed pricing options.

    However, you can create different pricing options for each product category with a custom cart.

    Custom carts also allow you to include promotional offers and discounts in the pricing mix, making the product listing more profitable with Ecommerce mobile app development.

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The Final Word

No shopping cart software fits all. Some cart software offers more features at a lower cost. The right platform will ultimately depend on your business model and the features your online storefront requires and.

The shopping cart is the place where customers decide whether to purchase. Contact Coders.dev for more information about the services.

Paul
Full Stack Developer

Paul is a highly skilled Full Stack Developer with a solid educational background that includes a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and a Master's degree in Software Engineering, as well as a decade of hands-on experience. Certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect, and Agile Scrum Master bolster his knowledge. Paul's excellent contributions to the software development industry have garnered him a slew of prizes and accolades, cementing his status as a top-tier professional. Aside from coding, he finds relief in her interests, which include hiking through beautiful landscapes, finding creative outlets through painting, and giving back to the community by participating in local tech education programmer.

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