The first step to learning how to integrate a shopping cart is to choose a shopping cart provider. There are probably hundreds of different types of shopping cart providers online. Some of theses shopping carts are entire shopping cart solutions. However, some are just of the mini cart variety. This means they might hold up to 10 or 20 items, but it doesn’t provide you with many management tools or other e-commerce services unlike the complete shopping cart packages. Many of the mini shopping cart options come with web hosting plans for your website. However, if you have a pretty successful website with lots of web traffic and the chance to sell products, you might want to consider upgrading to a more comprehensive shopping cart solution. This is a good way to ensure you have the necessary e-commerce tools to not only allow your customers to shop freely, but you can also manage the orders, manage inventory as well as shipping items. Many of these options also come with merchant account services like the chance to accept credit and debit card payments through a variety of payment gateways. Be willing to spend a few bucks each month on this type of a shopping cart service, but keep in mind that the amount spent is completely worth it as your website and e-commerce store is much easier to manage.
How to Integrate a Shopping Cart:
After you’ve chosen the best shopping cart solution for your online store, the next step in learning how to integrate a shopping cart into your website is to follow the shopping cart company’s steps for downloading and installation. You don’t have to have programming knowledge to be able to accomplish this part of the process in integrating a shopping cart into your website, but it does help. You likely will have a set of programming language to plug into your admin panel with your web hosting account. This is typically the best way to integrate a shopping cart in with your current website. However, if you have any questions about this part of the process, it is a good idea to give your shopping cart provider customer service a call. This is part of the reason it is so important to find the best shopping cart provider so you can make sure your customer services experience is actually helpful and not just hours on hold waiting for a technician that doesn’t even know how to answer your questions or help you solve a problem.
Once you’ve installed the shopping cart into your website coding, it is now time to finish the learning how to integrate a shopping cart part of this shopping cart tutorial. At this point, you need to set up your shopping cart for your website so it is easy for both the customers to use as well as easy for you to you as the merchant. There are a few tips to keep in mind to make this part of the process easy and successful for both you and your customers. First, use the design tools the shopping cart company has provided. If you’ve succeeding in finding a top-ranked shopping cart provider, you are likely in luck in having a great and easy-to-use store designing tool. Make sure your store looks awesome and attractive to new customers. Make sure your shopping cart looks easy to use as well as functional, so you won’t lose any customers or potential customers with the complexity of your shopping cart options.
Make It Simple:
Using a step-by-step process, you can make the checkout process super easy for your customers to follow. You’ll want to start with a sign in page. This is helpful for repeat customers and they can also store their billing and shipping information, which makes the checkout process super fast and easy, so they will likely come back for repeat purchases in the future. After the sign in page, establish the billing and shipping page. Make sure there are options to select the billing and shipping address as the same, or as separate locations. For some, their situation is different for shipping than for billing. Providing this option simply makes the checkout process easier for each of your customers. Next, allow for payment information and then the verify page followed by a confirmation page along with the confirmation number. You can choose to keep each of these pages separately, which might be a more simplistic option when learning how to integrate a shopping cart, or you might want to consider keeping the first three pages altogether. However, this requires a clean and simple layout or you will risk complicating the process too much.
Make sure you choose an icon for your shopping cart when you are learning how to integrate a shopping cart with your website. This icon makes it easy for the shopping cart to be accessed by the shopper as they continue shopping throughout your website. Make the shopping cart as well as the checkout/add to cart buttons obvious. This simplifies the process and makes it easier for your customers to checkout or to continue shopping, which in turn makes for more sales and increased profits for you as the merchant.
The biggest rule to keep in mind when learning how to integrate a shopping cart to your online store is to make sure you keep everything simple and easy. This is the best way to satisfy the needs of your customers without making the checkout process too lengthy or time consuming. This will encourage your customers to come back for repeat visits and even give your online business a growing reputation for being a great online source for specific products and/or services.