Online shopping carts are software applications that run off of your web server, in other words, your web host. If you have anything to sell on your website, these services allow for your visitors to “shop around” and take a look at everything. They can view product descriptions and prices and if they find something that they would like to purchase, they can simply add it to their cart and continue shopping until they are ready to check out. If you do not use one of these services and are trying to sell items, you will have to deliver each and every one manually.
When you use a shopping cart, it is fully integrated with your website. This means that you can add product descriptions, photos, and anything else that you want onto your website and then provide the secure link for your customers to click on and make their purchase.
How Does a Shopping Cart Service Actually Work?
Most shopping carts feature the same utilities such as a main portal for you to control your entire store. In your dashboard, you can add your products, set up your payment and shipping prices and process all of the orders. The majority of these services also allow you to monitor traffic and customer statistics, along with linking your auto responder account with your sales page which, in turn, puts your buyers onto your email subscriber list.
What is nice about using a shopping cart is that all of your information is stored in one database and is kept confidential and secure, instead of floating around out on the web somewhere. Pages are created when a customer visits your site and wants to buy a particular product. Once they add it to their cart and check out, they will be directed to your payment processor and then given a download link in real time. This is very important because if the actual download link to your product is kept in a static location, it is more than likely going to be picked up by scammers before too long. Protecting yourself and your products from hackers needs to be your number one priority before you even begin to start selling online.
Whatever it is that you wish to sell on your website; you really should be using some kind of shopping cart service in order to provide your buyers with the best customer service possible. Using one of these services will also provide you with peace of mind knowing that the hard work put into your site and products is being kept secure and confidential.