The first step in adding an online store must be deciding which approach to choose for the development process. Here our eCommerce development team compiled several options on giving the users buy products on your website.
INTEGRATED ONLINE ECOMMERCE STORES TO THE EXISTING SITE
Currently, building and maintaining integrated eCommerce stores is much easier and faster to do. Online-market provides a lot of uncomplicated out-of-the-box solutions.
In case you want your online store to stand out and be more personalized, go for the trustworthy eCommerce platform provider. Sure, this option will cost you more, but on the other hand, you will have the essential possibility to customize the e-store according to your business’s needs. One more plus of this option is the opportunity to scale up and introduce changes when the sales will increase.
INTEGRATION OF ONLINE STORE PLUGINS WITH AN EXISTING SITE
This choice will be a good one for your website in case your website is developed via a Custom management system (CMS) like WordPress. There is a great variety of eCommerce plugins that you can simply add to your website.
This option has many in-built advantages like integration with various payment systems, automated calculation of taxes, shipping costs, and fast inventory updates. One of the most popular and easy-to-use free eCommerce plugin for WordPress is WooCommerce. It powers 30% of all online stores nowadays.
ADDING ONLINE ORDERING OR A SHOPPING CART TO YOUR WEBSITE
You can choose another, shorter way to implement eCommerce feature – insert order online button or add a shopping cart directly. We recommend this option for small or middle-sized businesses that have a limited number of goods it sells.
Such providers like Web Shop Manager enable simple implementing to your website a “buy now” button or an external shopping cart. The difficult technical issues are already taken care of. Even if you are not a web-developer, you can install and manage it yourself.
A shopping cart may become a beneficial investment if you don’t need a big variety of payment options.
SETUP PAYPAL/SHOPIFY BUTTON
Still, a great solution for those, who don’t need to take much pains. Just add a payment gateway like PayPal, Stripe, or Authorize.Net. This is a very basic form of eCommerce that allows customers to select what they want, and make a payment to an external website.
To find out more about adding payment gateways to eCommerce websites, read our article.