What is the Difference Between Ecommerce and Shopping Cart?
Essentially, a shopping cart is a content management system (CMS) that stores product data and provides an administration portal. It renders website information and product categories for a consumer to purchase, and also serves as the hub for on-site merchandising and cross-selling. Order processing begins from the shopping cart and continues to the payment gateway. Hosted shopping carts offer the benefit of being free and allow merchants to manage inventory and omnichannel support.
Hosted shopping carts come free
There are several different types of online shopping carts. Some are hosted and some are licensed. These two types differ in implementation and management. With a hosted shopping cart, you do not need to worry about maintaining and updating your own website or downloading and installing software. Instead, your vendor manages everything for you. They will take care of system backups, upgrades, security, and more. Hosted shopping carts are a great choice for small businesses.
In addition to providing a safe and secure online shopping experience, a hosted shopping cart comes with features that you won’t need right away. The hosted option will also offer credit card processing. While setting up an eCommerce cart is not difficult, it will be more complicated if you don’t have technical experience. That’s why many people choose to use an off-the-shelf solution. These options will come with everything set up for you, but they’ll cost more than managing your own site.
They’re more complex than a shopping cart
Shopping carts, as the name suggests, are tools that enable online retailers to take orders. Most carts allow you to upload the information that is stored offline to your cart whenever you make changes to it. They are more complex and require more work to setup. Therefore, they are only worthwhile if you have a few hundred products and sell them online. Then again, ecommerce is much more complex than a shopping cart.
They give merchants more control over inventory
Ecommerce and shopping carts provide greater inventory management for e-commerce businesses. They act as intelligent bases that can analyze patterns and calculate important product stats. They process credit card information, maintain order history and can provide valuable stats on selling trends. The best carts also integrate with social media platforms. As a result, they can help track traffic and marketing campaigns. They can also help coordinate the activities of sales agents and teams on different locations.
Using a shopping cart allows a merchant to create a backend for the entire site. While online customers cannot see or edit the backend of a shopping cart, employees can view and edit the site’s content, manage inventory and update customer data. Some sophisticated shopping carts can also email tracking information to customers and track their orders. They can also identify repeat customers and offer them incentives or coupons.
They allow for omnichannel support
An omnichannel support strategy can help you retarget shoppers who have abandoned carts. Using multiple channels, such as email, SMS, Facebook Messenger, and apps, you can offer customers discounts or special offers for a limited time. The ability to see the customer’s activity across various channels will increase engagement and conversion. If you’re interested in incorporating omnichannel support into your ecommerce and shopping cart, these tips can help you get started.
One of the best ways to improve omnichannel support is to use a unified shopping cart. This way, you can eliminate the need for two separate shopping carts. One shopping cart is capable of supporting both online and offline channels. For example, you can integrate a shared cart and increase conversion rates on all channels. The shared cart feature can help you capture shoppers on mobile devices, which are growing rapidly as a shopping channel.
