Shopping cart offers the online customers a convenient way to collect the items they wish to buy at one single location until they finally proceed to checkout at the gateway. Shopping carts also offer discounts and quantity cards via which customers can save your hard-earned money.
Today a large number of people are inclining towards online shopping. For customers an online store is important not only because of its high level of handiness and convenience but also for its competitive pricing, broader selection and superior access to product details. For organizations that are involved in e-commerce, an online store enhances their customer value, better search engine ranking and thus increasing the profits.
Shopping cart is software, which provides the online customers a convenience of collecting the items or products that they want to purchase at one single location. In basic terms, it is a series of scripts, which keeps a track of all the items which an online visitor picks to purchase from an online website until they finally precede to checkout. The main objective of a shopping cart is to pass the information or the list of items selected, through a secure connection to the payment gateway.
The payment gateway after that channels the transfers through all the relevant financial networks, incorporating the Internet merchant financial account with your financial institution or bank. Credit cards are the best mode to pay for your shopping online.
With the introduction of Internet, shopping carts have come a long way in recent years. The features of a shopping cart facility are of great advantage for both the online websites as well as the online customers and include:
Cross selling function
Just like the physical shopping world, now the purchasing through Internet has become common. Purchasing via making use of shopping carts may provide customers attractive discount rates on selected products. Offering discounts can prove to be a great marketing strategy for marking place in highly competitive world of Internet business.
Quantity coupons and discounts
Shopping carts allows the potential online customers to avail some great discount rates as well as some exclusive offers on the desired products, thus enabling you to save a little part of your hard-earned money. Generally, the potential customers are offered with some unique codes, which are matched with a specific item or the overall discount rate and offer accessible on that specific product.
Newsletter and autoresponder functions
Online websites with shopping carts generally try to keep a track with their clients via emails and shopping fiestas. Some exclusive packages, customers of the month awards or festival bonanzas are offered through this aspect of shopping cart. Besides, any query or a complaint against any product or item can be reported via this feature of shopping cart. From the business point of view, it is a very good way to streamline your operations and maintain good relations with your clients.
Affiliate modules
Affiliate modules are essentially for the online shopping websites as it is one of the most effectual and low cost methods for advertising items or products. The affiliate modules are able to handle all the sign up process, streamline communication, provide statistics and most importantly maintain a track of all the online payments, which has to be made to the affiliates.
To attract customers they have to apply some beautiful and noticeable eye-catching counters. They have to appoint employees, salespersons to accommodate customers. These salesperson are paid on daily or weekly basis, so again its a major cost to run a store or mall. This is a running cost on owner's part.
The counters itself costs that may come under one time cost , and not as running cost, but its an expense. To manage all these running or one time costs they have to sell products at prices where they may make reasonable profit after accommodating all these costs.
On the other hand, to run an online store you don't need costly rental places. It may require a warehouse in a very cheap place, as such customers are suppose to look at your site not place.
It does not require to have beautiful racks and salesperson on those racks. All you need is to have an online identity, the domain name. It hardly costs 10$ per year. A hosting company to host your Home and product pages, a shopping cart to take your orders and accounting systems. Delivery mechanisms are easy to avail and usually costs put on customers end.
All the above mentioned things, i.e. hosting, shopping carts, accounting system does not cost a lot. It requires to develop online site from a web development company or even from a free lance individual developer. Along with web site an administration panel is developed to manage new products, existing product prices, Hot offers and much more.
These are usually easy to use forms that anybody can use to add / remove / update things. But its just one time effort and cost. Then you host those pages into a hosting company web server, that may cost on avg. around $200/year for a shared hosting. This is a good quality hosting company price. Shopping carts charges are nominal fees per transaction or can be availed on monthly basis.
On the other hand the procurement costs are equal for both online or offline stores, if lets say suppliers are same. But off-shore mall has to keep prices up to bare their costs for things mentioned above while the online store, if selling on the same rate can make much more profit than the off-shore one for the same products.
Thats the reason why this is logical for an online store, whether you are buying electronics good, jewelry, clothes, gadgets, cell phones, grocery items or whatever online store can offer less prices than an physical mall and this is what we should also expect from them, along with good customer care and money back guarantees.
Both David Pagotto55 David Pagotto55 & Aamir Ziad are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.