Cost and Features Involved in an Ecommerce Cart Development
I, as a technical writer, did also get confused when I first got to know that I have to write on an e-commerce cart. I was like, is that anything different from the ecommerce applications that we use almost daily? Isn’t it about Amazon, Flipkart, PayPal shopping, etc. but then an expert confirmed to me that, all of them are just named differently and given different terms geographically like some call it an Ecommerce cart, while some prefer Shopping Cart software, or E-store software, or Online Store software, Storefront software, and whatnot!
Nevertheless, we are not here to discuss what an E-commerce cart is and how many synonyms do ecommerce software solutions have, but we are here to know its cost of development and the ideal features required in it.
We’ll put a glance over the technical part first, and then will try to relate it with the real-time and general aspects that can be faced by the generic users.
Basics: The Necessary Part
As far as its basic structure is concerned, an eCommerce cart has two components. One as the ‘Storefront’, another as the ‘Admin panel’, that we seldom call ‘Administration’.
What happens is, any online shopping cart is basically run by both of the concerned categories of people. One is those who run the business, which means the business owners, however, the others are those who visit the website and perform shopping in it, the customers.
The Storefront, therefore, is developed and designed such that it may leave no such measures that become a reason for the customer to lose its interest in the ecommerce cart.
‘The front page’, colloquially termed as the ‘home page’ is always the impression maker, thus, it is emphasized in that way and then the other pages are considered for their necessary development.
Let us now move on to the features. First, to those that should be ideally present in an ecommerce environment. And then towards those which can leverage the overall business performance and help to achieve the business targets effectively faster than the competitors.
Note that, here, the word ‘effectively’ has a slightly deep meaning, which says to reach the target effectively faster, which means, the rate of progress would be faster, irrespective of the point of initiation.
Features to be In An Ecommerce Cart
We’ll not emphasize the storefront, i.e. the homepage at the beginning, as we have already mentioned its importance before. Let us step ahead into the necessary dimensions of an ecommerce cart that involve:
- Single page checkout
- Coupons and effective discounts
- Sales analytics
- A detailed Product page (Useful for Customers)
- Category menu by side (Customer)
- A Search page (Customer)
- Shipping option tools (Customer & Admin)
- Currency, sales tax, and accounting tools (Customer & Admin)
These are a mix of necessary features from the admin’s perspective, as well as from the customer’s.
- Single page checkout would play the role of the shortest line at the cash counters in the supermarket. As none of the customers wants to wait for a longer span once he/she has done the search and selection part.
A single page checkout would let the customer feel easy to come out by completing the most undesired part of e-shopping.
- Coupons & Discounts are crucial to keep the customers satisfied and bring them again for commerce. Also, note that the method of extracting the same amount from the customer by offering discounts but increasing the delivery charges has become obsolete.
People are smart now and could drop out of your e-cart by abandoning it noticing the same thing. Thus make sure to offer only effective discounts if you want or just don’t, so that the customer won’t leave unsatisfied.
- Sales analysis and reporting would be a vital part in making decisions over which part of our business is left untouched by the customers, and which part needs improvisation.
Having the sales analytics, your most traffic is coming from which geographical location can be traced. This might help you as a business owner to channel your business and do the needful to better it wherever required.
Note that, Analytics is a part that can be brought in by integrating Google Analytics into it, thus an e-cart must be ready for any sort of integration.
- A Product page should be neat and clean, defining all the necessary information related to the product, the reviews from the older customers about it, its ratings and feedback over the delivery, as well as the performance of the product.
Having all the biodata on just one page would allow the customer to know every desired thing about the product in just one go.
- By side category menu is necessary for channelizing the traffic and letting customers explore more of what they may want.
By incorporating the category-based menu and pages, none of your website pages would have to deal with the entire traffic at once, except the home page.
Usually, an ecommerce business keeps more than just one category for commerce purposes. Thus, determining and creating different categories would help customers to find their desired thing.
- Many ecommerce solutions do not have a well-performing search page. It should have intelligent searching abilities, and that requires intelligence-enabled programming.
Having so could become a reason to revisit for a customer because people remember which website was easy to search and operate.
- Shipping can be customizable to ease the customer and become a choice of them out of thousand competitors as not all of them would have the ‘shipping option’ as customizable.
If the customer is allowed to choose the date from the calendar to receive the delivery on available particular dates, it makes them feel like really owning something as they want.
It is a smart, tactical feature as the dates visible to customers would be only those in which the deliveries can be easily made. Thus, it could be a convincing feature, if you want to try it.
- Currency and payment options are game-changing features as they can control the diversity of customers to participate in your ecommerce business.
Imagine you are an open ecommerce business, with only USD as an allowed currency option for doing commerce. This would restrict many of your non-American customers as they might end up before beginning with the search part, knowing the fact that you have no other currency options.
Payment gateways and different modes of payment also become responsible for a major shift of customer retention rate from up to down or vice versa.
Coming on to the game-changing features that could make an impact on customers’ shopping experience, at their first visit only. These features are embedded to make things easy like decision-making for the customers over the price of the product and to proceed ahead if they want to, or to continue with adding more products without proceeding towards the checkout page, on choosing every product.
Cost Involved in Development of Ecommerce Cart
To understand the costing part, first, understand the parts that are going to be involved in it. As, it is not only about the programming part, but also about the hosting involved in it, the human capital, as well as technical resources required to manage the production, and much more than just visible entities.
The major parts are
- Hosting: This might charge us monthly/quarterly/yearly or larger. As per the market survey, generally, no hosting service provider offers less than $250-$350 per month for any sort of website hosting. However, cloud computing consulting services may range higher depending on the traffic we are assuming to be in our website and e-commerce application.
- Design: This would be the game-changing factor and we just should not stay relaxed here, or rely completely on the other. It requires software resources, as well as designers with adequate skill sets for producing effective design. It is a thick part consuming almost 20-40 percent of the entire budget to produce an ecommerce cart solution.
- Development: The prime one, which needs a thorough roadmap from the beginning to the end, with the scope of instantaneous improvisation. We’ll need business expertise here and technical adaptiveness.
The designing and development part could be relaxing as you may either hire an enterprise software development team or prefer a freelancer. Both would range between $2k to $5k to develop a mobile-based ecommerce software solution.
- Installation and Integration: It depends on the scale of the business. The larger the enterprise-scale, the bigger the amount for integrating two ecommerce software solutions with each other, because it is about keeping the data safe while integrating.
Integration is usually involved in the setup and configuration part, which usually demands equal cost as designing.
Conclusively, the cost may vary depending on the scale for every part usually. It might range between $20k to $35k for a well-performing ecommerce business solution.
Similarly, naming below some other features as well, that could be helpful from the customer’s perspective-
- A window that shows the number of products selected and their size.
- CTA buttons after every product to customize them individually.
- M-commerce accessibility to your ecommerce website could be completely game-changing as more than 75 percent of customers purchase products using mobile phones.
- Help option is a normal attribute, but having really helpful suggestions and FAQs are actually the game-changing ones. Research on the most frequent problems a customer can face and try to demonstrate the solution in the simplest way possible.
Add a voice note of instructions along with the text and images separately, and do not leave any scope for the customer to leave dissatisfied.
- Highlighting offers in a short window covering half of the home page screen can excite the customers that are just visiting the website for the time being.
Here are some of the additional functionalities and features that could leverage your business performance and help you achieve your business targets effectively faster than your competitors.
Make sure to hire the best ecommerce cart development agency in the USA like A3logics that is known for providing exceptional e-commerce solutions and other enterprise software solutions for the last 18 years across the globe.
Author’s Bio:
Scarlett is a technical content writer and is associated with A3logics for over a couple of years. She has been in touch with the product engineering services team and is often found struggling with some unique topics for her upcoming projects. She is often found discussing the latest developments with the technical team. When not working on any of her writing projects, she is either reading any of the Agatha Christie mysteries or busy gardening.
