Building a Website: Adding a Shopping Cart

By Chris McGinn

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If you have a website for business purposes, you likely need a way to sell your product to visitors. The easier you make it for them, the more sales you will likely close.

Internet shopping carts and services such as Paypal and Google Checkout are simple to add to your site to boost your bottom line.

Whether you sell items one at a time or offer a full range of products and inventory, there are options to match your needs. Shopping carts and money exchange services can also work for subscription-based services and even online donations.

Why does my website need a shopping cart?

An Internet shopping cart, like its real-world counterpart, allows visitors to browse your site and select items for purchase along with the option to remove them before the sale is final. A shopping cart program can also handle the behind-the-scenes aspects of selling items such as inventory management and data collection. There are a multitude of options that offer easy-to-navigate interfaces that do the hard work for you, such as NetSuite, Volusion, Network Solutions and Miva.

You can find shopping cart software through your web host or online, including open-source  and coding for basic free services as well.

Before you choose a shopping cart service or software, you need to consider the size and scope of your operation. Do you just have a few basic products, up to 20, or several thousand? Do you have your product information in a spreadsheet or database? What aspects of the experience do you want to be able to customize? Do you want to send your customers through a service such as Paypal or Google Checkout or handle the payment processing in-house?

Once you have answers to these questions, you can explore the multitude of options and choose one that best fits your business. When you get to the stage of integrating the shopping cart with your site you need to have your details ready either to enter by hand, import, or sync with a database such as Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL or My SQL. You need to determine what you are selling, what are the pertinent details to describe the item or service, and what options are available to customers. Most shopping carts provide the ability to give customers choices such as color, sizing, etc based on the product.  Images are also an option on most shopping carts so you will need to create acceptable images to showcase your products.

You might not need a shopping cart if you have a very limited array of products and there are few if any options. In this case, you might opt for a simple "buy now" button such as those available from Paypal. This option just cuts out the middle steps that allow the customer to review their selections and delete or add items to the sale. It also is geared to single purchase interactions.

If you have a larger inventory, than you definitely need a shopping cart because it is tied to a larger database that holds all of the pertinent details about your inventory as well as customer choices and order information. Rather than creating thousands of pages for each item in your inventory, the shopping cart software generates a dynamic page that pulls the needed information from the database (such as images, product descriptions, pricing information and availability). These programs are written in a variety of server languages such as ASP, PHP, CGI, or Cold Fusion. Check with your web host provider to ensure they can support the shopping cart option you select or if they offer one themselves.

What should I look for in a shopping cart?

A shopping cart program provides a "storefront" or interface with the customer as well as a behind-the-scenes interface for the user. Among the options to look for with a storefront are its search capabilities, customer service options, and visual appeal to the customer.

As the user you should consider administration options such as ways to control how the information is displayed and how easy it is to change information for multiple products at one. For example, if you decide to put all holiday items on sale, the cart should have a way that you have been able place items into categories and change information as a group. The shopping cart should also allow you to easily manage things such as shipping costs and payment options.

How do I get paid?

Buyers want to know that their payments are secure. Services such as Paypal that have already established their credibility boost your site's ability to offer customers the option to pay online.

Paypal's Website Payments Standard option allows you to accept credit cards or Paypal account payments from customers for a small transaction fee. The service can be integrated with many existing shopping carts and allows customers to transmit payment information via Paypal into your business' Paypal account. This money can then be transferred into your bank account or accessed via a Paypal ATM card.

To add Paypal capabilities to your site, you simply establish a Paypal business account and then choose the Website Payments Standard or Pro package. The Pro package allows for a more seemless integration by not transferring customers to Paypal's site to process the transaction.

You then customize your product and payment options via an easy interface and copy and paste the generated code into your site as directed.

Similarly Google Checkout also allows you to give customers a simple, secure payment option without having to process payments individually. Like Paypal, Google Checkout offers a shopping cart option or can integrate with a wide array of third-party shopping cart providers.

Whatever you are selling, a shopping cart is an essential tool to complete your business website.