Building a Shopping Cart

Building a shopping cart is about creating a favorable shopping experience for your customer. Helping a customer navigate through pages of products and easily find their way to items they wish to purchase is the key goal of an online shopping cart. It’s important that your business makes building a shopping cart that meets this expectation a top priority. To build a customer friendly shopping cart, it’s important to know the characteristics that affect a customer’s interaction.

Building a shopping cart with multiple category levels helps a customer steer their way through even a large site with ease. This allows them to narrow their search towards the items they are shopping for, and gives them a continual sense that they are heading in the right direction. It also keeps them from having to wade through a lot of products they are not interested in to get to the item they want.

Another feature to consider when building a shopping cart is a search function. Just like multiple categories help a customer find their way to the product they are looking for, being able to search for items by description or keywords helps get a customer to an item easier and sooner. The goal is to have a customer spend less time looking for products and more time buying them.

Once a customer has found the item they are shopping for, another aspect to consider when building a shopping cart is how to let them make selections such as size and color. Rather than have a customer sift through multiple items that are really the same base product, drop down menus are the way to go for such selections. 

Imagine, for example, your store sells baseball caps in a few sizes and colors. One way to present the product is to list a small red cap, a medium red cap, a large red cap, a small blue cap, a medium blue cap, and so on. It is much more efficient and more professional in appearance to allow a customer to choose to purchase a baseball cap, select a medium one, and then select it to be red.

Now that your customer has selected the exact item they want, this is where the actual shopping cart feature comes into play. Your customer is able to select an item, put it in their cart, and then either pay or continue shopping. This is true for all shopping carts. The difference is that some shopping carts are easier to get in and out of than others. When building a shopping cart, think about how accessible it is from various pages of your site. Can a customer get to it from any page in the store? Is it easy to select items and put them in the cart once they are found or remove them if a customer changes his or her mind?

There are many things to consider when building a shopping cart, but every bit of time and effort you put into making a quality site will help draw customers to your store.