Online Shopping Cart

Most ebusinesses would benefit from having a shopping cart online. Customers will find it easier to make purchases with the interface the shopping cart provides for your business as it walks them through the process. To get a good idea of how a shopping cart operates, we will take a walk-through of the operation of a shopping cart.

Coming into the Shop

A shopping cart with an easy to navigate storefront lets consumers choose from an easy to follow menu to help them find the products they want to buy. A good example would be a person shopping for wearing apparel. He or she should be able to select the category they want easily, such as shirts, pants, skirts, shoes, etc. This way, the person does not have to look through shirts and shoes to find a skirt. He or she can easily go straight to the section that has only skirts to find what is being sought.

Searching

When someone comes to your online store, it should be easy for him or her to find the items needed. The menu should be easy to follow and clearly list all the categories. To help facilitate the shopping experience, a search box can be very useful. One way for it to be set up is to have two boxes; one for keywords and the other with a drop down menu listing the categories. There can even be an option for subcategories if needed to narrow the search further. A shopper should be able to go backwards through the levels easily, too, or even just go back to the main menu to the home page.

Choosing

Once a shopper has decided on an item to buy, it must be easy to put the item in the shopping cart and continue shopping. Shoppers should also be able to go to the shopping cart at any time to change quantities, styles, colors, replace or even delete anything in the cart. Keeping track of what the customer adds, replaces, changes or deletes is the root of the shopping cart.

One thing that really makes it easy for customers to keep shopping to return to the page they were on before when they click the 'continue shopping' button. This is especially helpful when they are making several purchases of items that are similar to the one just added to the shopping cart. If a customer ends up back at the home page every time an item is added to the shopping cart, they may get frustrated and go somewhere else.

In Summary

When a customer has put all the products he or she wishes to purchase in the shopping cart, the next step should be the page that updates the shopping cart with any additional fees, such as taxes and shipping. Here, the customer can make any final changes to purchases before the final checkout process. There may be questions the customer needs answers for here. A simple way to handle these questions is to have a link to specific information next to each additional fees that explains the particular costs of that area. This would include how much the taxes are for certain states that require sales tax and what methods are used for shipping with the prices listed. Customers are more likely to shop with you again if they get these answers before they hit the payment button and it is too late to make any changes.

Payment