Most businesses understand the importance of having a website today. Clients, prospects, employees, and others expect the business to have a virtual home address on the Internet. Since most businesses sell products and services, a shopping card attached to the existing website helps to generate additional sales around the clock.
Adding a shopping cart to an already existing website can be very challenging (and some people may not know they can adding a shopping cart without a complete site redesign). It’s possible, and even easy, to add a shopping cart without making major modifications, e.g. navigation changes and links, with a shopping cart solution download.
Why Add A Shopping Cart.
The U.S. Census Bureau reported that e-commerce businesses comprise a USD 142bn industry in 2013. Consumers buy books, household furnishings, and auctioned goods online. Businesses can often create one or more online stores to add new revenues without substantially increasing the cost of sales with an online business. The online shopping cart is essential to the store’s success because few online shoppers have the patience to print, fill out, and fax an order or call the business’s toll-free customer service line.
Costs to add an online shopping cart are minimal. Some web development sites offer a free-trial to new users to try out the online shopping cart without making a long-term commitment.
Separate Host Services For Shopping Carts
A shopping cart host service saves the e-commerce or e-tail store many headaches and costs. For example, there’s no need to arrange a secure server, SSL technology or certificates, or database software for the purpose. These costs can add more than five hundred dollars to the site’s operating costs every year!
Separate shopping cart host services also allow the site to retain customer information on an external secure server that is accessible via any Internet connection. If the site owner decides to change host services, there’s no reason to worry about reconfiguration of the shopping cart because it’s managed by a separate host.
Shopping Cart Payment Gateway Compatibility
The site’s shopping cart must be compatible with top payment gateways, too. Hand-coding the shopping cart to achieve this level of compatibility is very challenging. Payment gateways should work seamlessly with shopping cart functionality in order to process credit and debit card transactions. This is one of the best reasons to identify and use compatible shopping cart software.
