It’s an essential tool that must be considered in great detail because it’s at this stage of the buying process that the prospect really becomes a customer.
Choosing the right shopping cart and configuring it correctly will make the purchasing funnel smoother and reduce the bounce rate or the abandonment rate as much as possible.
The cart functionality or shopping cart can be proposed within a complete content management system (CMS) or integrated on a website as standalone software in SaaS or an open-source version. It allows you to process payments from the ecommerce catalog on your online store.
This software is represented on the site page by the symbol of a shopping cart or a bag.
It permits customers to add products as they browse. The added products are then kept for a determined period of time in the shopping cart, which displays the total price. Once the shopping cart is validated, the customer can proceed to the payment from the cart functionality software, without having to leave the site.
The cart functionality allows you to manage orders and purchases in a secure way. It generally offers several payment options (credit card, PayPal, payment by check, etc.) and can integrate a shipping process.
The dashboard, on the back-office side of the shopping cart, can also offer practical functionalities, especially for order management (sending an email with each order, saving the order, editing invoices, calculating shipping costs, etc.). It can also help to manage stocks and restocking.
Some CMSs such as WiziShop allow you to create ecommerce websites with a shopping cart already integrated.
