E-Commerce Shopping Cart

One of the best e-Commerce shopping cart features today is the ability to build and price a product online. Automotive manufacturers were some of the first to use this method on a wide scale. On their sites a customer has the ability to start with a base model car or truck and add the features and accessories they want onto the vehicle. 5-speed or automatic? Sunroof or hardtop? Cassette player or 6-disk cd changer? Whatever options a customer wants can be added to their car, and the price will change accordingly.

Another example is buying a computer online. With a sophisticated enough e-Commerce shopping cart the consumer can select a computer model and then select the various components to go with it. They can choose what size hard drive, how much memory, which sound card, and all of the other options available with computers today. The e-Commerce shopping cart will keep track of the combinations chosen and present the customer with the totaled price. And if the customer changes their mind all they have to do is deselect a component or choose a new one.

If your online store sells products that come with a variety of features and accessories, you too need an e-Commerce shopping cart that can handle this level of shopping. In the original versions of shopping carts, each possible combination of features would have to be handled with a separate item in the store. If you sold a product that had two different features with three different options, you would have to have nine separate listings to capture all of the combinations. And what about an item that has five different features with three or four options each?

The technology behind this build your own shopping is known as subfields. When an e-Commerce shopping cart uses this concept, a subfield is assigned to each possible component. This subfield can either contain the choice of features or the choice of whether or not to have the particular feature at all. These subfields are then populated by the shopper, and the e-Commerce shopping cart knows the price of each choice within the subfield and totals the item accordingly. 

Another feature that can be used with subfields is to have a separate graphic for each combination. If a shopper wants to order a red soccer jersey with white numbers, a picture of this product will be shown. If they change their mind and want to see what black numbers would look like, they just change their answer in the subfield and the picture changes accordingly. This is not only a fairly efficient way to let customers see the various combinations, but it is also fun for the shopper to see the picture change to reflect their new choices.

If this type of build your own shopping is appropriate for your products, then look around for an e-Commerce shopping cart that has this subfield component to it. It will make your customers’ shopping experiences more meaningful as your product line will be easier to navigate.