The Shopping Cart
Each product on the website will have a button link, which when clicked will add the product to a shopping cart. The cart will:
- Total the products
- Display shipping options
- Calculate delivery costs based on weight and/or delivery time.
- Calculate discounts or promotions
- Calculate VAT
- Enable the customer to change the number of products or delete products.
- Enable the customer to return to the page from which they came, in order to continue shopping.
- Enable the customer to proceed to the Checkout and on to the Payment Gateway.
You may wish to have other options, such as Gift Wrapping or Gift messaging included at this stage.
It may be an advantage to the customer if you have signed up to one of the postcode lookup systems that are available. Customers are getting used to forms that are completed automatically.
Take every opportunity to sell. You have seen it, so try using it. The customer puts one item in the basket, but before they go there suggest other items they might like, or tell them other items purchased by customers who have purchased the same item. This is called Up-sell and Cross-sell.
Finally, decide if you want the customer to be taken immediately to the basket, when they add an item to the basket, or whether you want the customer to have a basket summary on the page and for them to opt to go to the basket at a later stage. There are arguments either way.
Check the following - it is a cheap and very good option for a smaller business.
If you already have a real Card Swipe Machine, then you can use some Shopping Carts to securely obtain the customers card details and then manually enter into the Card Swipe Machine as a 'Customer Not Present' transaction. This is a cheap option as there is no need to use a payment gateway and you can potentially reduce fraud as you can see if the transaction appears fraudulent before it is processed. However, it takes time to manually process transactions and your acquiring bank might not allow you to use this method - check your terms and conditions.
If you can't do this, or you don't want to -
Back to ' Initial Development'
Continue to ' Payment Gateway'
