How to Add a Shopping Cart to Your Website

If you have an existing website there are various ways of adding shopping cart functionality to the site without having to completely redesign the site or move it to a new ecommerce package.

What Does a Shopping Cart Do

Basically a shopping cart allows you to select and de-de-select items to purchase and once you have finished to go ahead and purchase them.

You display details of your products, and with each product you add a button that says ‘add to basket’ (or similar). If your customer wants to buy the product all they need to do is press the ‘add to basket’ button.

What this does is create a list of things being purchased. The customer can view the list at any time to see what they are purchasing and how much they have spent.

They can also add/remove items at any time. When finished they click another button to actually make the purchase (often labelled ‘go to checkout’).

Shopping carts are used when you have several products to sell.

It can do much more than that (i.e- send emails, add shipping costs, accept coupons etc).

Because of this they can range in complexity from simple HTML forms to sophisticated programs (usually written in php).

Quick and Easy Shopping Cart

Shopping carts need to be integrated into some form of payment system so they can accept payments.

Paypal which is a payment provider provides a shopping cart as part of the payment system and is by far the easiest and quickest way of adding a shopping cart to your site.

To start, all you need is to sign up for a free PayPal account (which only requires an email address). Then you:

Log in to your PayPal account.
Click on the Merchant Tools tab
Click on the Multiple Item link (you may need to scroll down to see it).

In the video we will see how to Add a Shopping Cart to a Website using PayPal.

This method adds an HTML shopping cart so your site doesn't need to supporting scripting like php. In addition you don't need a merchant account as everything is done using your PayPal account.

The transaction is secure as it is processed by PayPal and your site doesn't need encryption.

The method can be used for as many items/products as you want but is ideally suited for sites selling a small number of products due to the basic product management.

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