Top 5 Shopping Cart eCommerce Platforms
Looking for a seamless transition to selling your health, medical or wellness solutions online? Enter the shopping cart platform. Online shopping carts are impressive pieces of software that – much like the cart in your local grocery store – make it easy for clients to select, and purchase, a range of products and services from your website.
What Does Shopping Cart Software Do?
The main function of shopping cart software is:
- to allow online customers to gather and save the items they’re interested in buying
- to calculate and display the total cost of the goods they’ve selected for purchase
Once a client has finished browsing your site – and is ready to pay for their order – it’s shopping cart software that redirects them to your check-out page, and conveniently displays the price and description of every item in their cart.
Shopping cart platforms do more than just add up prices of goods in a cart, however. They’re also designed to quickly calculate the total of any:
- applicable taxes
- promotional discounts
- gift card payments
- shipping charges
Thanks to this bit of technological magic, your client is given all the cost information they need to complete their purchase online.
But despite their versatility, there’s one thing that shopping carts can’t do, and that’s process your customers’ payments. Even with the appropriate software installed on your website, your business will still need a merchant account, and the secure gateway solution that makes authorizing and transferring payments into that account, possible.
Which Shopping Cart is Right for My Business?
There are dozens of online shopping carts to choose from, and everyone has a favorite. Before exploring the right software for your health, wellness or medical business, take some time to introduce yourself to five of the top shopping cart platforms here:
Shopify
Shopify is a reliable shopping cart option that includes secure, SSL 256-bit encryption technology. With the option to accept both credit cards and PayPal, this software automatically calculates sales taxes based on both your company’s, and your buyers’ locations.
Volusion
As one of the simplest platforms to use, Volusion offers all the basic shopping cart features, along with a handy collection of web-building tools. The company makes itself available to customers on a 24/7 basis, for free.
BigCommerce
With lots of features, and a user-friendly approach, BigCommerce is a solid shopping cart choice. The software offers great performance on mobile devices, and features plans that include unlimited storage and bandwidth.
3dcart
Top-notch tools for building, marketing, and growing online sales – and customer support that’s included – make 3dcart a strong contender for your shopping cart needs. The software features an administrative panel that’s both intuitive, and easy to navigate.
WooCommerce
If you’ve chosen to self-host your company website through WordPress, the WooCommerce shopping cart solution might be the one for you. As a fully customizable website plug-in, this option is free to download and install, with no monthly fees.
The team at Beacon can assist you with setting up your Payment Gateway if you already have ecommerce software. The Beacon Payment Gateway integrates with most all major ecommerce software solutions. If you need assistance with setting up an ecommerce website and implementing one of these ecommerce software solutions, Beacon can also develop an ecommerce website.
