Can you imagine a supermarket without carts? When it comes to purchasing online, shopping carts perform more functions than simply carrying the products.
It stores the products you wish to buy and the information about them including product category, price and order options description. The cart also serves as a gateway to the checkout screen, calculating the total cost of the purchase. Besides, it guides the buyer towards managing orders, catalogue, and customer’s account. To put it simply, a shopping cart is what transforms “I am just watching” into “I’m ready to buy it”.
SapientPro eCommerce development team is constantly investigating the problem of online cart abandonment as almost all the e-commerce platforms face this issue. Nowadays, the average online shopping cart abandonment rate has reached 69.57%.
Why the numbers are that high? Some of the reasons can not be avoided as long as there are users, who visit e-commerce sites just to examine the market, compare prices, save for later buying. Still, there are issues that depend fully on the e-commerce website. Being aware of the core of the problem gives you a benefit in fixing it.
The key reasons why people abandon online shopping carts include the following:
1 – long and complicated checkout process;
2 – extra costs like shipping, taxes, fees are too high;
3 – not enough trust to payment gateways;
4 – the website requests creating an account;
5 – Not enough payment methods, especially when the preferred one is not available.
The majority of these issues proved to be solvable and result in an increasing number of buyers and higher incomes. However, you will have to sweat harder in order to optimize the checkout usability.
At this point, you need to choose the way of shopping cart development. There are basically two of them, hosted and custom.
Implementing a hosted or generic shopping cart means that the third-party service provider has all the responsibilities like hosting, maintaining and updating. Those providers include Shopify, Magento, Opencart, PinnacleCart, and Virto Commerce.
It won’t cost you a pretty penny, so if the budget is an issue for you, a hosted cart is the best solution. Besides, you don’t necessarily have to be experienced in development. The integration of such carts is not rocket science anymore with the abundance of special platforms available on the market.
Don’t forget that hosted carts are a one-size-fits-all option. You have to work with a limited amount of design templates, functions and value additions.
Custom or licensed carts are far more flexible to meet all the needs and the requirements of the specific e-commerce business. This option enables adding all the needed extra features to your cart.
Be ready to spend more money on the opportunity of full customization. Besides, compared to a hosted cart, it will be more difficult to find a solution to issues occurring with the cart on your e-commerce platform.
But the benefits of custom cart development really worth investments. The main focus is put on the specific needs of your business, taking into account the customers’ preferences. A custom cart is your way of enhancing customer experience drastically.
First of all, concentrate on the essential features a shopping cart should include. Provide your customers with easy navigation so that they may quickly find the needed products. Add big and functional product images and reviews to improve the user experience. Another “must-have” in shopping cart development is fast and easy checkout. Don’t forget about deals and discounts to attract more buyers.
Here we compiled the most useful tips for creating a custom Shopping Cart
– add a concise description to each product in the cart;
– be sure that the speed of cart opening and closing doesn’t have a negative impact on the performance of your website;
– besides the default currency (USD), make the use of the local currency possible too;
– provide several product shipping options;
– implement various payment methods.
Online shopping websites are becoming great competitors in brick-and-mortar shops. To become a leader on the market, think of your customers and prevent them from leaving the cart before the checkout. You will see, the benefits you can receive from a custom shopping cart worth the cost and efforts applied.
