Why Your Online Business Needs a Shopping Cart
The goal of every online business is to make purchasing goods and transacting online much faster and easier than physically buying in-store. The more you address common pain points of transactions, the more likely your customers will return to your platform.
Improving your customer’s quality of life means adding a shopping cart feature to your website. Although it might seem like a small and missable feature, this can actually make or break your customer experience.
What Are Shopping Carts?
Inspired by the real life physical transaction process, this is a piece of software that helps the customer store and keep track of the products they want to buy. The shopping cart goes beyond itemizing products intended for checkout, though—having this feature allows the online business to directly accept a customer’s payment while assembling the distribution of information to relevant parties, such as customer’s shipping information to the merchant and payment processor.
Why Is It Important?
Shopping carts make it much easier for customers to buy on your website. It encourages your customer to make a purchase when browsing through your website by displaying product information, your business catalog, and making transacting effortless.
For example, if your online business operates mostly out of a platform like Instagram, your customers will have to scroll through your entire feed or through your highlights to determine what’s available. You will have to manually update each post with inventory and sizes and attend to customer inquiries through the comments. Your customer will have to remember each product they would want and manually list it down in a direct message to you. Additionally, they’ll have to send proof of payment. The overall process is tedious and time consuming, making it difficult to attract customers.
Having a shopping cart eliminates all those frustrations. It automatically logs the inventory of each product on your website so you won’t have to manually update it each time. Your customer will be able to select quantity or size while adding the product to cart. This allows them to add as many items as they want to the shopping cart and immediately see the total upon checking out. A shopping cart will also direct them to a payment platform, making the transaction seamless and quick.
Your online shopping cart is also helpful in overseeing your business. It stores product information, helps you catalog your products, and helps you manage your customers and their information.
What Are My Options?
There are two basic types of shopping carts that you can use for your e-commerce platform. The first one is called a hosting shopping cart, in which a third-party firm ‘hosts’ the cart and oversees server maintenance, backups, and upgrades. Hosting in this form usually comes for free, which means that you won’t have to shell out additional money to make sure this aspect of your website is running smoothly.
Meanwhile, a licensed shopping cart gives you full control over the type of cart they’d like, allowing them to customize it according to their needs. Licensed shopping carts offer a much more flexible approach to changing the customer’s buying experience on your website, as you have the ability to change its features and functionality.
Conclusion
A shopping cart can transform the way customers do business with you. It makes the process simpler, quicker, and easier, which will definitely make for a smoother experience for your customers. By having one on your website, your website visitors will be more likely to browse through until they start clicking ‘add to cart’—giving you even more customers and profit in return.
Magnitude Marketing is a local SEO agency in Greenwood that specializes in results-driven digital marketing. We help brands grow revenue and profit through our strategic marketing solutions. Our services include search engine optimization, pay-per-click management, and web design and development. Get in touch with us today to request a consultation!
