Myriad Of Ecommerce Shopping Cart Design Alternatives
A shopping cart is one of the main elements of an e-commerce website. The websites should make sure that the shopping cart page is well informed and at the same time easy to understand for the customers. Even though thousands of people use e-commerce sites to order daily not every customer is tech-savvy. To tackle this issue e-commerce websites should put more attention on the shopping cart page as this is the deciding page from wherein the customer would make the final decision to buy the product or not.
Ecommerce Shopping Cart Design Alternatives
For creating this one must choose the right shopping cart software. Many times the website relies on the programmer to build the shopping cart, however, the programmer might not understand the requirement of the website to the core and this is where the shopping cart software comes into the picture.
A few of the recommended trends of shopping cart designs are: –
Enlarged product Image – This is one of the most important features which will enlarge the product when the mouse hovers over the item. Famous e-commerce website like Amazon uses this feature.
Device Compatibility – E-commerce websites should make sure that the shopping cart is easily accessible on laptops and smartphones as well. The design should not be much different on any of the devices. This helps a customer understand where certain features of the cart are located.
Additional Language – There are many linguistic barriers and introducing multiple languages for shopping carts will help e-commerce websites to retain customers. This will also help the customers understand the product’s pricing and other important stuff.
Payment Security – Shopping carts have to deal with payment options as well. Thus, the sites should be optimized effectively so that no hackers can gain access to them.
Scalable resources – The platform should have scalable resources which can accommodate more customers during festive seasons and not go down. Many of the websites are turning to cloud platforms for these scalable resources as there is on-demand pricing and a pay-as-you-use policy.
There are various options or companies which provide to make shopping cart designs for e-commerce websites.
Magento – Many of the high-end eCommerce websites use Magento in designing their shopping cart. Magento provides many themes which can also be edited as per the requirement.
X – Cart – Xcart also provides pre-developed themes for shopping carts that can be integrated into the client’s requirements.
There are two types of shopping carts that can be implemented: –
1. Licensed Shopping Cart – In this method the e-commerce platform will have its own shopping cart. They can customize the cart as per their requirement and make changes as and when required. However, this also requires high upfront costs and a technical support team all round the clock for providing support.
2. Hosted Shopping cart – In this method, the shopping cart is on third-party websites. They would be responsible for maintaining the cart and the servers holding the cart. There is no upfront cost involved in this method. One of the main drawbacks of this method is that customers will have to leave the e-commerce platform for payment options to another website.
Shopping Cart Abandonment
This is one of the major issues that is being faced by e-commerce platforms. Customers add the items to the shopping cart and then do not go ahead with the payment options. The companies need to identify why the customers are not going ahead with the orders and then tackle them. A few of the most common reasons are: –
- Not much information provided by the merchant
- The website is too slow on this page
- The design of the website does not seem genuine which makes the customer lose confidence in the payment option
- The website keeps on crashing from time to time
- There are no mobile-friendly payment options.
A few of the companies which have the best shopping cart pages are: –
B&H – They provide additional accessories as an option with the one that the customer has purchased and this makes it quite professional.
Tilly – The e-commerce platform displays a mini cart when a customer clicks on add to cart and the mini cart can be seen at any page the customer jumps to.
Shopping cart designs are most integral for any e-commerce platform and are most important for completing the transaction. One must make sure there are low sale Abandonment issues considering the above points.