Online payments and donations: benefits of e-commerce

e-Commerce: online shopping carts

An online shopping cart is a piece of software that assists your customers when buying goods and services on your site. Just as in the physical world, an online shopping cart (also known as a shopping basket) allows a visitor to collect multiple items before proceeding to completing a purchase transaction—that is, prior to ‘checkout’.

A shopping cart is a useful feature on a retail website because it enables a visitor to continue to browse for more items to purchase, while keeping a record of items they have already chosen. Often there are benefits for a user to buy multiple items at the same time—for example, this can increase the number of things a customer purchases and assist in reducing shipping costs by combining multiple purchases into a single delivery.

Setting up a shopping cart

To set up a shopping cart on your website requires:

• some form of product catalogue or database populated with the items available for sales
• the ability for the user to select items and add them to the shopping cart
• the ability for the user to view the items in the shopping cart
• the ability to remove items and increase or decrease the quantity of each item in the cart
• the ability for the user to see the total purchase price
• the ability to continue shopping (adding items to the shopping cart) or to conclude the sale by progressing to the payments stage.

While most people require a website developer to help initially build a shopping cart system, you can ask your website developer to train you in how to maintain it. If you are able to add, remove and modify items yourself, you can keep your site updated in a timely manner and at a reduced cost compared with having to hire an expert each time you want to make small changes.

If you are just getting started in e-commerce and have a limited budget, there are ‘ready to go’ hosted e-commerce services available. These take care of the security and payment aspects of the site and allow you to start selling quickly and easily by focusing on the product and marketing aspects of your online store.