Published on August 28th, 2019 | by Atman Rathod

Key Reasons to Have Custom Shopping Cart and The Key Features

Without a shopping cart, any eCommerce store stands incomplete and non-functional. Besides being an integral part of the eCommerce store shopping carts are also designed to fulfill the specific business goal of the online store and the intended shopping experience.

In the present context of online stores, the abandonment of the shopping carts remains to be a leading concern for the vast majority of online stores all over the globe. Well, besides other factors, the development flaws have some serious contribution to the shopping cart abandonment. While three fourth of online shoppers simply leave a store without finishing the purchase of items in their carts, any eCommerce business should give utmost importance to this.

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This is precisely why, leading eCommerce stores these days insist on building custom shopping carts instead of adopting out-of-the-box shopping cart solutions. Every shopping cart needs to design and develop shopping carts based upon their audience and product line.

But just because custom shopping carts are not like readymade solutions, building them needs expertise and a grave understanding of how shopping carts actually work. Here through the length of this blog, we are going to explain each and every aspect of custom shopping cart development.

What Are the Key Options for Shopping Cart Development?

To give you a fair understanding of the pros and cons of all types of eCommerce development options, we will define the role and the advantages and disadvantages of the generic carts and the custom carts.

Generic Shopping Cart

When the third-party hosting service provider hosts, maintenance and upgrades shopping carts and provides server backups, the cart is called genetic or hosted shopping cart.

The most beneficial thing about such a shopping cart is the huge cost advantage as they don’t cost a penny. If you want to save the cost of shopping cart development, it comes as an ideal solution. Apart from this cost advantage, generic carts come with a lot of shortcomings.

Let’s see the pros and cons of generic carts.

Pros

It comes as an inexpensive solution costing nothing for the cart development.
It also comes as an easy solution involving least complexities.
Shopping carts of this sort proves to be ideal for small startups and enterprises with fewer resources and technical knowledge.

Cons

Just because generic carts offer a very “one size fits all” solution, they often fail to address concerns and issues of modern eCommerce stores.
Just because generic or hosted carts require customers needing to go to a third-party website for processing payment, this undermines user experience to a great extent.
Generic carts being very commonplace lack scope of any value addition in terms of features or design elements.

Custom Shopping Cart

When the business owner builds its own shopping cart and customizes it to meet specific requirements and preferences, this is called custom or licensed shopping cart. This type of shopping cart has more flexible features and allows third-party add-ons.

Here are some more pros and cons of custom shopping carts:

Pros

Custom shopping carts provide a whole array of customization options that in turn benefit the shopping experience.
By meeting specific customer needs and branding requirements, custom shopping carts deliver a far better customer experience leading to more business conversion.
By allowing integration with third-party tools custom shopping carts actually offer a lot of flexibility and scope of making value addition.

Cons

Custom shopping cart development costs a lot more than generic or hosted one.
Since custom carts will be built entirely on the responsibility or the eCommerce stores, it requires more expertise and experience.

Key Reasons to Opt for Custom Shopping Cart Development

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It is quite understandable that just as your business brand stands different and recognisable from hundreds of other brands, a custom shopping cart will carry the look and feel that your audience prefers or go well with your brand image. Such specific requirements cannot be fulfilled by the run of the mill generic carts.

Let us explain some of the key reasons to opt for custom shopping cart development.

1. Keeping With the Growth Rate of Your Business

If you are not a novice in the web, you must have known already about the factors like lack of performance and page loading speed that negatively impacts your user or customer experience. With an eCommerce store, the problem is even more complex.

When your store experiences tremendous traffic volume, it is actually something to cheer about. More traffic to your store obviously means more scope of business conversion. But what happens when your old shopping cart software performance just crumbles under heavy traffic load? Well, that’s when a generic cart can seriously affect your business and can even bring a bad reputation to the store.

Just because your business is constantly scaling up in size and traffic volume, you need to have a more scalable solution that can adjust to rising traffic volume easily without really affecting performance and output.

2. Addressing Business-specific Shipping and Inventory Concerns

Most eCommerce stores when starting their business initially go for shopping partners like FedEx, DHL, USPS, UPS, etc and stay relaxed about shipping. But their relative peace of mind comes to a halt when they realise with the increase of number and variety of orders, such shipping solutions come as impractical and ineffective.

Apart from meeting such common challenges, for delivering a lot of different types of products you must have a tested and tried shipping solution at a place. A custom shipping solution coupled up with shopping cart can really take away the entire concerns. With custom carts, more specific orders can be tracked.

3. An Omnichannel Experience

Customers at our time are very picky and tricky about their choice of products and purchases. Every customer while buying online already miss the benefit of trying it in a trial room and touching as well as operating the product. If these two aspects go in favor of physical stores, there are others that make online shopping experience great. This is why a shopping cart needs to offer customers Omnichannel experience.

Omnichannel shopping experience refers to shopping across multiple channels including physical store, mobile-browsing, mobile apps, social media, retargeting campaigns, etc. By managing Omnichannel experience for your customers you can give a solid boost to the business conversion and loyalty for an eCommerce brand.

Custom shopping carts are an integral aspect of Omnichannel shopping experience that allows you browsing products and making the purchase through the mobile app with an option to pick up the product from the store. You can see a product online and book it through physical or the mobile app.

4. Selling Custom Products

For all those online stores that sell designer products or highly customised items based on customer preference, they need a custom cart. The run of the mill shopping carts cannot serve the purpose of such custom sales needs.

Custom shopping cart is crucial for designer or custom products because often the rate of such products vary based upon specific orders and preferred specifications mentioned by the customers. Naturally, the so-called off-the-shelf cart solutions are incapable to calculate the prices of such products.

5. Running Multiple Promotions

In eCommerce stores, shopping carts also run promotional offers, discounts, coupons, credits, etc. Without these promotional elements, most eCommerce stores do not stand a chance to beat the competition. But a so-called generic shopping cart with the fixed rule of pricing cannot always accommodate all the different and multifaceted promotions.

6. Product Distribution Needs

An eCommerce store may need to expand the business through product distribution and allow the distributor to deal with the shipping rules and all the related formalities and charges. By allowing them to manage the shipping in their own terms you actually get the scope of reaching a wider audience and expand your customer base.

But managing such product distribution model involving various parties ranging from the manufacturer, distributor, retailer and the end customers often becomes really challenging. To keep all these parties happy while maintaining growth through proper inventory management you need a shopping cart built to deal with your specific inventory needs. This is not possible with the genetic carts.

7. To Stand Out with Unique Shopping Experience

Finally, as an eCommerce store, you just don’t want to be another one among the hundreds or thousands in your niche. You obviously want to stand apart from the competition with a specific look, feel and shopping experience. Well, this custom shopping experience and look and feel of your eCommerce store is not possible without a custom shopping cart.

Thanks to the custom shopping carts, you can deliver your customers a lot more than the common features that any store will provide. From assigning your own promo codes to offer different types of discounts to synchronising the shopping cart with the inventory management system to allow customers to make payment in their preferred way, a custom-built shopping cart will help you deliver a standout shopping experience with a lot of additional features and value additions.

Must-have Qualities for Custom Shopping Cart

So, custom shopping carts provide so much in comparison to the run of the mill ones that they are simply irrefutable for the modern eCommerce stores. But while building custom shopping carts, you are also prone to making errors and common mistakes. Moreover, even after building a custom cart, it may not be as satisfactory as you thought it out to be. Considering these, here we are going to explain the key qualities that custom shopping carts must-have.

Easy operation: Custom built carts don’t need to be complicated for use and day to day operation. They can be extremely simple and time-saving. While building your custom cart for the store, make sure it’s simple, easy to use and can be updated with much difficulty.
The Capability of Selling Unlimited Products: If you are spending money on building a custom shopping cart it should be more capable to handle a lot of products than the generic carts. Even if you are starting small, you can scale up in the future and so make sure the new custom cart can sell an unlimited number of products.
Multi-Store Capability: The custom store also allows you to handle the transactions of different stores through one single admin panel. This multiple-store function is to a key to maintain scalability and ease of operation for the future. The feature should also allow you to set themes for each store along with different product categories and prices.
Multi-Lingual Support: If you are ambitious enough to reach out to the global audience, make sure your custom-built cart supports multiple languages for communication.
Multiple-Currency Support: Similar to multiple languages support your custom shopping cart should also offer support all major currencies to help people from different parts of the world to buy from your store.
Multiple Payment Methods: You need to ensure that the cart supports an exhaustive range of payment methods ranging across net banking, cards, digital wallets, Cash on Delivery and other secure payment methods.
Multiple Shipping Methods: A shopping cart built with custom features must offer support for a wide range of shipping methods ranging from doorstep delivery to store pickup option. Every different shipping method should have rules of exclusion.
Plugin Compatibility: A good custom-built shopping cart will be highly compatible with the plethora of plugins on that platform. If you hire an expert Magento development company, you have hundreds of plugins that can add value to your custom shopping cart.

Conclusion

It is quite clear from the above description that custom shopping carts stay way ahead of the generic ones in terms of value, features, and output. If you are really going to be recognised as a customer-friendly eCommerce brand in your niche, you have no choice but to build your own custom shopping cart.

Tags: business, cart, magneto, online shopping, shopping

About the Author

Atman Rathod is the Co-founder at CMARIX TechnoLabs Pvt. Ltd., a leading eCommerce website development company with 13+ years of experience. He loves to write about technology, startups, entrepreneurship and business. His creative abilities, academic track record and leadership skills made him one of the key industry influencers as well. Social Links: Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/rathodatman/ Twitter - https://twitter.com/RathodAtman Skype: atman.rathod Medium: https://medium.com/@rathod.atman Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CMARIXTechnoLabs/