Shopping Cart

Shopping Cart

Introduction

In e-commerce operations, or the operations involving shopping through online platforms, the most important feature is the shopping cart. An e-commerce shopping cart is quite similar to the shopping carts that customers use in physical shops and supermarkets: in a physical store, a customer places all the items selected for purchase in a shopping cart before proceeding to pay for them; in e-commerce, a shopping cart is the part or section of a website or shopping application that keeps track of all the selected items to automate the process of purchasing and payment (Stubbs, B. (2019). An e-commerce site should allow a customer to open an account and log in to place items in their shopping cart for purchase and payment. An e-commerce shopping cart also allows customers to view all their selected items. It also allows customers to save items they wish to purchase later until they are ready to pay for them. This paper discusses various issues related to e-commerce shopping carts and the process of shopping online.

Shopping Cart Design, Operation, and Features

The adoption of e-commerce has increased in recent years, with customers preferring to shop online rather than visiting physical stores (Stubbs, 2019). E-commerce enables customers to conveniently shop for items without having to move or travel to shopping centers. Emerging issues in e-commerce shopping include login requirements and the convenience of shopping carts. It is important that online shopping sites provide shopping carts to ease the process of shopping for customers. With shopping carts, customers are able to complete the selection of all the items that they need before proceeding to payment and other activities. Without a shopping cart, a customer would have to complete the payment and the input of details for each item before they can move on to select another item. This would make the shopping process inconvenient.

With shopping carts, a customer is not required to provide any login details or location information until they have completed the process of selecting items and intend to pay for them. There are certain features that customers expect to find in an e-commerce shopping cart (Golwalkar, 2019). Customers expect that the shopping cart where they place the selected items provides details of the item, its quantity, its price, and a description of the item. They also expect that the shopping cart will provide a subtotal cost of the items selected and details of the various prices and discounts. In addition, an e-commerce shopping cart has to include a section where customers can enter any coupons that they may have, in order to complete shopping (Golwalkar, 2019). Shopping carts have become the standard method of processing online purchases and sales. They offer various features that make the customer’s shopping experience easy, convenient, and enjoyable.

Businesses have recognized the important role played by the shopping cart in e-commerce, and are focused on improving the customer’s shopping experience, thereby acquiring a competitive advantage over their competitors. For this, businesses have to understand the various key performance indicators for e-commerce shopping, such as the cart abandonment rate, the average order value, and the number of clicks per day (Ferreira, Pedrosa, & Bernardino, 2019). A good example of e-commerce business and the operations using shopping carts is the recently introduced Amazon Go platform. Amazon Go is a shopping platform that Amazon Inc. opened to allow shoppers to purchase items via a mobile phone application. Customers only need to download the Amazon Go app and scan an item they wish to purchase using the app (McFarland, 2018). The shopping cart in the app automatically tabulates the cost of the item and deducts that amount from their Amazon account balance. There is no need for checkout or cashiers on the Amazon Go platform.

By eliminating the frustration that customers undergo waiting in line to pay for items, the company has achieved competitive advantage and benefitted largely in terms of sales. E-commerce shopping cart technology is the next big thing in online business and shopping. An emerging issue in e-commerce is the integration of e-commerce with social media platforms (Javid, Nazari, & Ghaeli, 2019). Such integration allows customers to review the items that they purchase and comment on their online shopping experiences. They are able to read the comments of other people on items and make informed purchase decisions.

Conclusion

Online shopping is the ‘in thing’ today, with a majority of customers showing a preference for online shopping as opposed to conventional shopping in supermarkets and malls. It has become the pinnacle of convenience for many customers. A key feature that provides convenience in online shopping is the shopping cart. The ability of the shopping cart to list all the items selected by a customer for a long period of time until the customer pays for them is advantageous for customers. Besides improving the online shopping experience for customers, e-commerce shopping carts provide data to businesses that engage in e-commerce, data that can be used as intelligence for the purposes of improving the customer’s experience online (Ferreira et al., 2019). Amazon Go is a good example of a successful business platform that utilizes shopping cart technology.

References

Ferreira, T., Pedrosa, I., & Bernardino, J. (2019, June). Integration of Business Intelligence with e-commerce. In 2019 14th Iberian Conference on Information Systems and Technologies (CISTI) (pp. 1-7). IEEE.

Golwalkar, Y. V. (2019). U.S. Patent Application No. 10/169,806.

Javid, E., Nazari, M., & Ghaeli, M. (2019). Social media and e-commerce: A scientometrics analysis. International Journal of Data and Network Science, 3(3), 269-290.

McFarland, M. (2018, October 3). I spent 53 minutes in Amazon Go and saw the future of retail. Retrieved October 11, 2019, from https://edition.cnn.com/2018/10/03/tech/amazon-go/index.html.

Stubbs, B. (2019). U.S. Patent Application No. 16/129,387.