Why eCommerce shopping carts are worth the fuss

Every online retailer needs shopping cart software for their site to function. It is what facilitates the process from searching for a product to completing a purchase, so naturally, it’s non-negotiable. A good shopping cart is often the key to conversion – turning browsers into buyers and making sure that your site is easy to navigate.

There are loads of decisions to make when choosing how to set up your shopping cart software. Do you want a hosted shopping cart, where the shopping cart provider takes care of all the maintenance, backups, and updates – so you don’t have to? Or do you want a self-hosted shopping cart where your developers can completely customise and optimise the software for your business for seamless integration? Or do you want to go a step further and build your own software yourself? Whichever you choose, here are five things that are key to getting the most out of your shopping cart:

1. Ease of use

Customers want convenience. If they have to spend time working out how to use your site, scroll through options that aren’t relevant to them, or fill out long and complicated checkout forms, they simply won’t bother. And if they leave because they don’t like using your site, there’s little hope of getting them to return. A good shopping cart will have a user-friendly interface that can be used across multiple devices, allowing your customers to find exactly what they want and check out quickly.

2. Choice

Increasingly customers are expecting to see a wide range of payments options available to them when checking out, including digital wallet payments and PayPal. Giving your customers these options vastly reduces checkout times, decreasing cart abandonment.

3. Security

For smaller businesses, using well-known shopping carts can lend credibility to your business, leading to higher conversion rates as customers feel more comfortable trusting your business with their information. Using hosted shopping carts also comes with the additional benefit of customer card details not being stored on your servers, decreasing the risk of fraud or cyber-security attacks your business could be exposed to.

4. Efficiency

Shopping cart software not only benefits the customer but also you as the business owner directly. Good software should aid in maintaining a solid record of the transactions made by your customers and tracking your inventory, as well as helping to manage all of them efficiently in terms of tracking, coupons, wish lists, and information.

5. Tailored experiences

Shopping cart software can help create tailored and personalised experiences for shoppers by remembering wish lists, providing personalised user experiences, tracking purchases, sending reminders, and using customers’ previous orders and purchase habits in order to show them things that they are likely to want to purchase. This encourages customer loyalty and more frequent purchasing from your store.

Cashflows is currently integrated with WooCommerce, Magento, and OpenCart, with more plug-ins available soon! If you want to learn more about our integrations: