Introduction to Shopping Carts/Online stores
Shopping Carts/Online stores consists primarily of the distributing, buying, selling, marketing, and servicing of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. It can involve electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, e-marketing, online marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), automated inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. It typically uses electronic communications technology such as the Internet, extranets, e-mail, e-books, databases, and mobile phones.
Shopping cart or online stores are like packages of useful features like product classifications, categories & sub categories, prices in diffrent currruncies, shopping carts in different languages and many more to accelerate your entire business online. Creating Shopping Cart or web store online. Shopping Cart or online Shopping Store goes through different stages which include building of Website, managing it, administrating the database, processing online orders & executing them with the help of different payment gateways & shipping facilities, etc.
Nowadays Shopping Carts can be created in two ways. you can either choose a professional webdesigning company to create a customized shopping cart or select ready templates from hosting company who give ready shopping cart softwares along with its hosting.
Built in Shopping Cart with Hosting (Ready templates)
Many hosting companies provide hostting plan which comes with a shopping cart program that is already built into the hosting plan. Its the easiest way to create a shopping cart.
What you have to do is just select a hosting company which provides merchant payment gateways or in built shopping cart softwares indeed a Payment Gateway Service Provider to accept credit card on behalf of the merchant with the payment gateway software that needs to be integrated with the website to enable a secure transaction. transaction. Many companies even provide free megabytes of web page space and a free 'point and click' website builders.
After choosing a Payment Gateway Service Provider the next step you have to do is select a template which would suit your business from the list of templates offered by them. Your website look feel remains same as the template and then you have to add products, their prices, Colours, sizes of data, display and other details in them.
Thus your shopping cart is ready. The disadvantage of this kind of built in shopping cart is that they can be slight expensive and even if reasonable one cannot customize them according to their needs and choices. Whatever features the ready template provide you have to use them. As a result while selecting template you may like look & feel of one template but selling features of other template. Now if you choose look n feel you'll have to compromise with advanced features for your shopping cart and vice versa. And so Creative Web Solutions along with ready templates for shopping cart softwares even provides customizable shopping carts and online web stores for its clients.
Creating customizable shopping cart.
The development of customized shopping cart undergoes many stages of development.
First thing we do is detail study on clients business to better understand which feature suits the same.
Next is building a website. Website development includes stages like first providing two three designs (look n feel of the website) for selection of website design.
After its selection it includes adding database and features to the website like Setting up Categories, Setting up Products, Setting up Product Options, One Page Checkout, Merchant Accounts, Shipping & Tax, Setting up Website Text, Basic Design, Discounts & Coupons, Hosting Control Panel, Importing, Color Swatch and Alternate Views, SEO Setup , Advanced Design, Bulk, Data Update and CRM Systems.
The main advantage of creating custozed shopping cart is that we can get all in one prepared. The shopping cart can be developed as per our choices and our required features. Thus we can even shorlist the features from our shopping carts if not needed which is not possible in ready softwares.
See what you can ask for your shopping cart in User Section
The product categories are dynamic in nature which is to be entered by the administrator in the admin section. The home page displays the product categories and sub-categories. The page also includes some attractive product images. It includes the ‘Product Search’ feature to enable the customer to quickly locate a product.
The customer will be able to Login to his account, incase he is already registered or sign up for an account incase he is a new user by filling up an online registration form. On successful login, the customer is directed to his account where he can do the following:
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Edit Profile: Customer can edit details that he had entered during registration.
Previous Purchases: Customer can view his previous purchase history.
View Products: Displays the product collection.
My Wish List: Displays the customer’s wish list.
Change Password: Customer can change his account password if he wishes to.
Order Tracking: Customer can track the status of his placed order.
Product Navigation: Displays the category and/or sub-category to which that product belongs.
Product Image: Displays a thumbnail of the product image. To view a larger image, a button is provided for the same.
Price: Displays the price of the product. The price displayed is for one quantity of that product. The customer can change the quantity when his/her shopping cart is displayed.
Brand: Displays the brand of the product.
List of Serviceable Cities/Countries: Displays a pop-up of cities or countries to which that product is deliverable. If the product belongs to Global Product Category, list of serviceable countries pop-up shall appear otherwise; list of serviceable cities pop-up should appear.
Product Description: Brief information about the product.
The customer should be able to perform any of the following actions for the product that he/she is currently viewing:
Write Reviews: The customer can write his/her reviews and comments about the product. He/she can also rate the product based on five parameters namely poor, good, better, best and excellent.
Read Reviews: The customer can view the average rating of the product and also read reviews written by other customers. The rating is displayed in the form of a Gantt Chart.
Add to Wish List: The customer can store the product if he/she wants to buy it but cannot buy it at present because of budgetary constraints or for any other reason. Adding the product to Wish List removes the effort of locating it when he/she is ready to buy. The system should check for the login status of the customer before granting permission to access this feature.
Buy Now: If the customer wishes to buy the product he/she can add the product to the shopping cart by clicking on the Buy Now button.
The customer can then proceed towards payment of the order (through payment gateway) by paying through credit card or through internet enabled bank account.
Other relevant information:
You can ask for an area in the footer of every web page for Help Desk which is linked to Frequently Asked Questions web page.
Along with personal, billing and shipping details there can be an area for the customer to fill in other details like Message to the Recipient, Occasion, Preferred Date of Delivery etc.
Links to static pages such as About IDG, Terms, Marketing Policy, Privacy Policy, Security, Contact us etc. should be present on each web page for better catching of pages in google.
Features of Shopping Cart/ Online Web Store
- Integrated with major shipping companies.
- Improved security, best in reliability.
- Tools to help sell your products & services.
- Assign products to multiple categories & sub-categories.
- Allows your customers to manage their account.
- The customer will always find what they want.
- Features that customers LOVE like Customer Reviews, Recent History, E-mail product to a friend, Shopping Cart Summary, Wish list and many more.
- Accept credit cards, checks & PayPal with ease.
- Powerful Administrative Control Center.
- Easily customize the look & feel to make it YOUR OWN.
- Superior customer support.
- Advanced Features of Online Shopping Cart like Advanced data import / export capabilities - Ability to import any spreadsheet or database, including all of your products, customers, etc.
