Carts / Transactions

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All About Shopping Carts, Part 2. Basic Functions Dr. Ralph F. Wilson Web Marketing Today - Sep 1, 2009

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In part 1 of this series we discussed the main categories of shopping cart systems. In this article I want to describe the basic functions of a shopping cart ordering system, whether it's a basic cart or a sophisticated store-building system. Fortunately, most carts have the basic functions pretty well under control. The better carts allow greater flexibility in some areas.

Product and Option Selection

First, you need your customer to be able to select one or more products. This can be as simple as an order button for a single product. But could be much more complex when you have sizes, colors, and quantities to deal with.

For example, let's say you're selling monogrammed dress shirts. You'll have:

• Single options. Color is pretty straight forward: red, purple, green, blue, teal
• Multiple options. Things get more complicated when your product has more than one set of options available, such as color plus size. Be aware that a few carts may choke here.
• Options with price. With size options -- S, M, L, XL, 2XL, 3XL -- often the larger sizes may cost more, so your option feature would need to be able to carry the price of each option. Most, but not all, carts allow this.
• Customer input. Your customer might need to indicate which letters should be used for the embroidered monogram. Products that require any kind of customization will need some field where the customer can indicate specific needs.
• Quantity. Some carts allow the customer to indicate on the product page itself the quantity of items needed. Others only allow quantity changes after the product is selected and placed in the cart. If you have products that are commonly bought in quantity, it's easiest for the customer if you allow quantity to be selected on the product page. But I recommend that you set a default of "1" so that a customer who wants to order a product quickly won't be forced to enter a quantity.
• Variable dimensions. If you sell goods with variable dimensions, such as cut cloth or certain building supplies -- or other specialized features -- you'll probably require custom programming.

When you're shopping for carts, realize that more basic carts may allow a selection of color, but won't necessarily carry a different SKU for each color. Because of such option idiosyncrasies, it's best to test a cart carefully before committing fully to it.

Shopping Cart

Once your customer has made a selection, the product will appear in the shopping cart, a kind of intermediate page prior to final checkout.

The cart page needs to clearly show what products have been ordered as well as the quantity and a subtotal. A good cart page will allow the shopper to easily remove a product from the cart or change quantity. Poorer carts force the customer to figure out that they must set the quantity to "0" in order to delete a product. Make it easy for your customers to do what they desire.

Most carts allow customers to select shipping preferences in the shopping cart -- a sometimes awkward step that we'll discuss below.

Most carts allow two paths from the cart:

• Continue to Shop, or
• Complete Order, Checkout, Finalize Order

You'll want a cart that makes it very clear how to complete an order. Too often, the path to checkout isn't clear, causing your customer to become frustrated, lose momentum, and abandon the cart.

Shipping Calculations

Determining how to charge for shipping is one of the key decisions a merchant needs to make. Most stores allow only a single type of shipping for the entire store, so your decision must fit all your products. The only exception to this is that many carts allow you to add a flat handling charge on a product by product basis to provide for special shipping requirements.

Your store-wide options are usually these:

Flat Rate Shipping. Useful mainly if most of your products are the same weight and size, such as CDs. With this option, all products have the same shipping price.

Shipping by Sales Total. The idea behind this approach is that, with some types of products, the price is directly related to the cost of shipping.

Shipping by Weight. The most flexible approach is shipping by weight. All carts will allow you to set up a table of weight ranges for each shipping type. Then it will automatically calculate shipping charges based on the total weight of the products in your customer's order. This works quite well with carriers that have a flat rate throughout your delivery area. The US Postal Service, for example, has flat rates for domestic mail via media mail, Priority Mail, and Express Mail.

Shipping by Weight and Zone. The most basic carts may not have this option. But the better carts facilitate a real-time Internet interface with shippers such as UPS, FedEx, and the US Postal Service. For these to work, however, your customer will need to enter a postal code. Then the shipper's program calculates shipping costs for the weight and zone to be shipped to and will print a shipping label for the product.

The problem is, however, that unless the customer already has an account with your store and is logged in, you need to have the customer enter a postal code before you can give an exact shipping price. This is awkward. Your customer wants to know shipping charges without having to divulge personal information. Ask for too much information too early forces a greater degree of commitment may cause your shopper to balk and abandon the cart. Two options are:

• Post clearly on the product page the typical shipping charges. You customer doesn't want any surprises.
• Ask for the customer's ZIP and tell him the reason you need it.

When you looking for a shopping cart, take time to work through the steps involved for the customer to determine shipping charges.

Some carts offer additional shipping options, such as allowing the merchant to specify the base shipping rate in the product database, rather than having it calculated when the customer places it in the cart.

Tax Calculation

Tax calculation used to be pretty straightforward. But it's getting more complicated. Some carts only allow sales tax calculation by states. The better ones allow you to set up a table to calculate tax by postal code within your state.

Some states require merchants to charge tax based on the county or tax zone of the customer rather than the location of the store, so a merchant might need to charge different sales tax rates depending upon the residence of the customer.

If you're in Canada or Europe you need to calculate VAT taxes, which most carts will handle.  It gets more complicated if you're obligated to collect taxes in more than one country or jurisdiction.

The net effect of aggressive moves by states to collect sales taxes on Internet sales is that the better shopping cart programs will need to develop more flexible tax calculation methods. If you're a larger merchant, you may find yourself collecting sales tax for many different states. In that case you'll want to select shopping cart software that can use a third-party plugin, such as Avalara, to calculate the sales tax for a transaction and plug the correct figure into your shopping cart -- and track all those taxes for you.

E-mail Confirmation

Another basic function of shopping carts is to send e-mail confirmation to your customer as soon as an order has been completed on your site. The better carts allow you to customize this e-mail to some degree. Carts with order management features may also allow you to send a shipping confirmation e-mail when you ship, though this isn't as common among the shopping carts that I've seen.

Those are the basic shopping cart functions. In future articles we'll examine store-building and merchandizing features that the better carts offer.

Dr. Ralph F. Wilson is an e-commerce expert. He has built stores for dozens of clients (including a prominent Internet Retailer 100 company) and has written extensively on e-commerce. He is the author of The Shopping Cart Report (Second Edition, 2004). He is the founding editor of Web Marketing Today.