Easy Ways to Add an Ecommerce Shopping Cart to Your Website

If you sell items on the internet through an e-commerce site, you have to have a shopping cart to make it simple for customers to pay you. Shopping carts are programs that allow the customer to choose products; it additionally calculates shipping charges and tax, if applicable, processes payment then records billing and shipping addresses. Carts are so common that a lot of customers will not bother doing business with a site that does not offer one.

Easy Ways to Add an Ecommerce Shopping Cart to Your Website

• Get a merchant account either through an online merchant service or your bank. Both are going to charge numerous fees to process the customers' credit card charges and then deposit the funds into your bank’s checking account.

• Check with the web hosting company to verify if it provides a free shopping cart or for a nominal monthly charge. If the answer is yes, it is possible to add it to your site with a couple of mouse clicks. The hosting provider will give you directions on how you should do this, in addition to a way to directly access the shopping cart to obtain reports, which includes sales taxes collected and total sales per month.

• Utilize a PayPal shopping cart. This payment gateway is trusted by the majority of online consumers and if you add PayPal’s shopping cart to your website, PayPal deals with the transactions for a nominal fee. If you use the payment gateway, you don’t need to obtain your merchant account to accept credit cards.

• You can take advantage of open-source software to obtain a shopping cart free of charge to add to your website. Open-source software is created collaboratively, and anyone may download it for their use. Open-source shopping carts come with technical support and documentation, which makes them simple to use as shopping carts you’ll pay for.

• Purchase software that will assist you in installing a shopping cart on your site. You’ll have the ability to tailor the cart and add features as necessary once your business grows. The cost of shopping cart software goes from around $65 to over $200.

• If you’re able to, you can program your cart, using Structured Query Language and Hypertext Preprocessor. Usually, this is too complicated of a task unless you are a professional website designer.

Other Considerations When Adding the PayPal Shopping Cart

You might have the ability to make extra sales by inviting your customers to develop user accounts on your site then save products in their carts to return then buy at some other time.

The more the cart acts like an actual shopping cart, the more at ease your customers will be. They ought to have the ability to "drop" products into their cart, see a list of what is inside the cart, have the choice to take an item out, and check the total price of all products in the shopping cart before they check out.

Be sure to comply with the law while collecting sales tax for the products. You’ll have to collect tax for in-state consumers, report the sales to your state then forward the taxes that are collected to the state treasurer. Getting a business license is step one toward correctly reporting sales tax.