Whether you run a content blog with advertising or do affiliate marketing on your site, it is a good idea to have a shopping cart for selling digital goods. You may choose different kind of checkout process, depending upon the number of products you intend to sell. In this article, let us explain how to add shopping cart to your website in order to collect money from customers.
Small or Big Scale Online Store
In order to sell products online, you should have an ecommerce platform for receiving orders, processing, checkout and payment collection. However, you may not need all these functions completely integrated in your site. Choosing the ecommerce functions and adding shopping cart depends on many factors:
- Size and scale of your online store.
- Intended way of allowing checkout process.
- The framework or content management system you use.
If you have one or two digital products then the ideal option is to choose a third party checkout process. On other hand, when you have full-fledged store with hundreds of products then you may need to go for solid ecommerce platforms integrated with your content management systems.
How to Add Shopping Cart to your Website?
Follow one of the below technology to add shopping cart to your site.
1. PayPal Payment Processing
PayPal is one of the popular online payment processing systems that you can use independently or as an integrated solution. You can add product page on your site and embed add to cart or buy now buttons from PayPal. When users click on the button, they will be redirected to PayPal site and pay through either card or using their merchant account.
Many of the website building tools offer integrated PayPal service making it easy for users to add shopping cart. However, you need to have PayPal business account in order to use payment buttons on your website. You also need to pay 2.5 to 3% transaction fee depending on your country.
2. Google Pay for Business
Other independent option is to integrate Google Pay buttons to collect amount from your customers. Google does not charge any fee for transactions when using Google Pay. You can go to Google Pay site and signup for an account. Get the code and insert on your site to add shopping cart function.
3. WooCommerce for WordPress
WooCommerce is the most popular plugin for WordPress content management system. If you are running your store or site on WordPress then this is an ideal option for you. You can install the plugin for free from WordPress repository and start configuring as per your need. With the popularity of WordPress, WooCommerce powers 28% of online stores.
WooCommerce offers different payment methods including PayPal with credit cards, bank transfer, check payments and cash on delivery. You need to purchase additional add-ons in order to use other options and customizing your store.
4. Shopify
If you are looking for a full fledged online store to run your business then you need to go for an end to end ecommerce solution. Shopify is one of the popular and easy to setup option to open your store. You can accept credit cards with Shopify with the transaction fee around 2.4%.
Go to Shopify and start your trail account to test the functions of online store and payment processing. If you are happy then upgrade to the premium version starting from $29 per month. The Shopify Lite version will cost you $9 per month allowing you sell products on Facebook Pages. If you have lot of Facebook follower or friends then choose the lite version and start selling through Facebook.
Final Words
The independent payment solutions like PayPal or Google Pay are good options to integrate with any type of websites. However, if you are not a developer or do not have time for integration then you should look for a package like WooCommerce or Shopify. It also depends on the number products you want to sell and the payment methods you want to offer to your customer.
