Tag Archives: ecommerce shopping cart

Shopping Cart Templates

If your website runs an online store so that it can sell merchandise to customers, there are several methods that you can use to sell your product to the customer. However, the most efficient method of getting customers to buy your products easily is to use a shopping cart. There are many benefits to shopping cart templates.

Benefits of the Shopping Cart

When a website decides to sell a whole catalog of items, they will typically make it easier for customers to buy multiple items by allowing them to use a virtual shopping cart that will store all of their items until they decide to check out. It would be a hassle to have customers buy items one at a time, and the shopping cart eliminates this difficulty. It is common practice to make it as easy as possible for customers to purchase goods so that they don’t change their mind.

Not only does it make it easier on the customer, but on the credit card processing company as well. Shopping carts can be used to create a list of items that need to be shipped out on your end. This is a lot easier than going through one item at a time and matching it with the customer ID so that you can send it off to the correct place.

Coupons and Deals

The shopping cart idea also allows for the use of complex coupons and deals. For example, if you have a buy two get one item free sale, the shopping cart keeps track of the amount of items that the customer buys and will be able to implement the deal without any outside work. It not only keeps track of the amount of items that the customer buys, but can keep track of the total money spent that can be used for other deals. Without the shopping cart, it would be difficult to track this information.

Adding Items

It is really easy to add items to your product list with a shopping cart. If you have a quality shopping cart template, you will be able to enter this information into your website very quickly. If you have a website that is constantly changing the products or services that it offers, this could be vital.

Creating Your Shopping Cart

It can take a lot of work to construct a shopping cart from scratch, so you can save time by using shopping cart templates. These templates already have all the graphics and coding completed, and are easy to use. You will be able to quickly learn how to place the cart on your own website, add and remove items that the customers can buy, place in deals and coupon codes, and every other aspect of the cart.

Once implemented, customers will be able to use it to keep track of their items. They can then proceed to a checkout menu and enter in their information that will send the payment to your account, and give you detailed information about the placed order.

Conclusion

Customers are much more likely to purchase from an easy to use website that specializes in simplicity rather than a website that they need to adapt to. This is a waste of their time…so increase your sales and reduce wasted time by using a shopping cart for your online store today!

Top Free Online Shopping Carts, Part 2

So let’s take a look at Beal’s list of the best free online shopping carts. It starts off with:

Number One: Agora Shopping Cart

AgoraCart heads up Beal’s list and is described as a customizable and secure open source shopping cart that you can install on an existing website. Beal says you get templates for setting-up your store, support for different product categories, options for different tax rates and back-end store management tools. Beal notes that this cart is PCI compliant and supports more than 10 payment gateways.

Beal notes that the free edition (5.2.x) is only supported through online community forums — but that an upgraded Gold edition is available for a fee. This upgraded edition offers additional license, features and support options.

Number Two: Broadleaf Commerce

The next entry on Beal’s list is the Broadleaf Commerce solution, an open source alternative for enterprise e-commerce companies. It’s enterprise-level platform, according to Beal, is built on Java integration technology and can be customized to specific business needs. Beal notes that with this software retailers can manage customer accounts, upset, create promotions and manage e-mail marketing campaigns. She says the platform supports social integration and search engine optimization tactics, gives catalog browsing capability, and can integrate any existing business database or fulfillment system with Google Analytics. Support and assistance, according to Beal, comes primarily from an online forum for discussion and contributions, articles, development guides and project API documentation. Broadleaf Commerce uses the Apache license.

Number Three: Commerce.CGI

Beal’s third entry in her top 10 is Commerce.CGI, the first free Perl shopping cart on the web. This software was first released in 1998 and is a fully featured shopping cart for Unix-based servers. But Beal notes it can run on Windows NT with a minor code adjustment. Commerce.CGI is flexible enough to be an add-on to an existing site or installed and configured to manage a new product website. Beal states that it has the standard features of a shopping cart — templates, tools to configure e-mail management, product search capability and payment method management. It supports sales tax, multiple shipping options, and discount calculations. The software is supported through the Commerce.CGI mailing list or BBS.

Number Four: Loaded Commerce

Beal’s fourth entry in the top 10 list is Loaded Commerce, version 6.5 of the popular CRE Loaded program. The Community Edition (CE) is a shopping cart designed for the small office or home office storeowner who wants to add trisection capabilities to an existing website. The program includes security modifications, as well as a number of features for product, customer, order and content management. It’s customization is robust according to Beal, and customers can change their site design — choosing from hundreds of templates — as well as edit customer information, orders, invoices and more.

Number Five: Magento

Magento clocks in at number five on Beal’s top 10 list. Magento offers an enterprise-class e-commerce platform that is supported by a global ecosystem of solutions partners and third-party developers, says Beal. Magento was acquired by eBay in 2011 and is part of eBay’s X.commerce business unit. This involvement from partners and third-party developers combined with the backing of eBay gives Magento a wide range of support and flexibility.

As an enterprise-class option Magento offers merchants marketing tools, search engine optimization assistance, product catalog management and browsing capability, one-page checkout service and a number of other tools for managing shipping, tax and customer service.

The latest release of Magento Community Edition (version 1.6.1.0) was reeled on October 19,2011 and is available under the open source OSL 3.0 license.

Continue reading for the rest of Vangie Beal’s list, when we reveal numbers 6 through 10.

Continue Reading – Top Free Online Shopping Carts, Part 3

Top Free Online Shopping Carts, Part 1