What is Shopping Cart Integration?
Shopping cart integration means the process of developing the connection between different software or apps and shopping platforms. The list of shopping platforms may include Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce, etc.
Why shopping cart integration is so crucial for eCommerce software providers who work with online store owners? Online shopping carts have become the backbone of both B2C and B2B eCommerce. For e-retailers, they play a central role. The platform they choose is the foundation of their e-stores and where they conduct their business processes. When a vendor's business reaches a certain threshold, many of them start using various B2B services to simplify the process.
They get help from order, inventory, and warehouse management solutions, shipping, email marketing, and other systems. But none of these services can work without their customers' e-store data. That is why they need to get access to the shopping carts by integrating with them. How successful this implementation would be for the B2B solution and how great its outcome would depend on the shopping platforms the software owner decides to integrate with.
Main Types of Online Shopping Cart Solutions
Shopping cart software is used by businesses looking to sell products or services online. There are several types of shopping cart software available. Here are the main types:
1. Hosted Shopping Cart Software:
- SaaS (Software as a Service): These are cloud-based platforms where the software is hosted and managed by a third-party provider. Examples include Shopify, BigCommerce, and Wix.
2. Self-Hosted Shopping Cart Software:
- Open-Source Platforms: These platforms are free to use, and the code is open for modification. Popular options include WooCommerce (for WordPress), Magento, PrestaShop, and OpenCart.
- Licensed Software: Some self-hosted solutions are offered as licensed software, where you pay a one-time fee for the software. Examples include CS-Cart and X-Cart.
3. Enterprise-Level E-commerce Platforms:
- These are robust solutions designed for large businesses with high-volume sales. Examples include Salesforce Commerce Cloud (formerly Demandware) and SAP Commerce Cloud (formerly Hybris).
4. Marketplace Platforms:
- These solutions are designed for businesses that want to sell their products on multiple online marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, and Walmart.
What Is The Best Shopping Cart Platform?
Shopping platforms are software that provides all the necessary tools for merchants to build their online stores. They serve as an interface between the eCommerce website and its deeper infrastructure.
Connection with multiple shopping platforms can bring a lot of benefits for B2B eCommerce software systems and enterprises of different kinds. To be able to help e-store owners organize and automate their e-retail businesses, such services as inventory and order management, mobile app building, marketing automation, repricing, shipping management, and others need to access their clients' stores databases. And this is impossible without shopping cart integrations.
Integration with the top 5 shopping cart software is an excellent scenario that needs to be considered firstly. Magento, WooCommerce, Shopify, OpenCart, and PrestaShop together power millions of web stores.
For example, there are approximately 500,000 store owners who use Magento. More than 28.19% of all e-stores are built on WooCommerce in 2022. The number of Shopify merchants is over 1,000,000, and they operate in 175 countries worldwide.
It's a significant part of the market. Shopping cart integration means that you can provide a service to the owner of any e-shop based on them. Consequently, all the store owners become your potential clients and a ground for earning more revenue.
The other side of the coin is that most of your competitors are probably has already built shopping cart integration with multiple platforms. But you can get a competitive advantage over rivals by performing integration with few more platforms that they don't support yet.
Less Popular Shopping Cart Solutions but Widely Used Worldwide
About as many stores as built on the top 5 shopping platforms mentioned in the previous paragraph are powered by other eCommerce solutions. Some of them are very popular in particular countries, while others do well globally.
For example,e-Commerce carts like Gambio, Zen Cart, and Hybris are preferred by German-speaking and other European users. So, integration with them would be beneficial for businesses working on or trying to expand to the European market. Gambio powers 51,000+ e-stores and is highly popular in Germany. 760,000 e-merchants are Zen Cart customers. And this eCommerce platform has a huge success in Germany, France, Italy, and Spain.
The integration with Squarespace, Ecwid, and osCommerce will help you to do it easily and in the short term if you want to increase the number of your clients in Australia or Canada.
Together, all the shopping platforms that fall into this category have no less than a million online stores built on them. Of course, this makes a slightly smaller clientele, but the prospect of having to offer what your rivals don't have is not a bad one.
Don't Forget About The Integration with Marketplaces
Besides the shopping cart integration, it's necessary to develop a connection with various marketplaces. It also can bring great benefits to your B2B SaaS solution. It can grow your business and gain access to a larger pool of customers, while your customers can save time when managing their eCommerce businesses and can see all their info in one place.
Primarily you should focus on the main and the most popular marketplaces as Amazon, Etsy, eBay, and Walmart. Each of these giant marketplaces has a vast reach and is used by millions of sellers worldwide, reaching billions of people on the planet.
In 2023 the number of merchants who use marketplaces increased dramatically. A significant number of e-sellers started to search for services like yours to automate their business processes. So, don't miss the opportunity to expand your software possibilities and think about the integration with marketplaces too.
A Complete Set of Shopping Platforms
By performing shopping cart integration with both 'leading shopping platforms' and 'other ones', you multiply your chances to success. You'll be able to provide your service around the world. As a result, you'll have the possibility to reach any e-retailer that would be interested in your software.
Establishing the connection with shopping carts does not only mean a greater market share but it also extends the functionality range of your business. A ready connection with the platforms enables you to retrieve, add, update and delete various store data. Also, you'll be able to provide new features that would be helpful for e-retailers.
How to Integrate with Shopping Cart Solutions Easily?
In order to let eCommerce applications and B2B solutions use store data, most shopping carts expose their APIs. In their turn, services need to integrate with the APIs to get access to the various information from the store.
Now, when you decide to get connected with shopping carts and marketplaces, it appears to be a problem to perform it effortlessly. The integration by itself is a very complicated process that requires much effort, and both time and money expenditures. Firstly, you will need to find an experienced developer that would be able to elaborate on the integration module. You will have to not only wait and pay a pretty penny for it but also maintain the integration after it's done. So it would be a perfect way out to find a solution to establish a connection with all the platforms at once.
There is a bit easier and faster way to integrate with multiple shopping carts - with the help of API2Cart. The service offers its unified API that enables you to get connected with 40+ shopping cart software. And of course, among them are Magento, WooCommerce, Shopify, OpenCart, and PrestaShop. Thus, you can perform one integration instead of numerous ones. You'll get access to the data of stores located on any of these platforms.
API2Cart supports a lot of eCommerce integrations and more than 100 API methods. With their help, you can easily do the following:
- Import orders from multiple sales channels into your system<
- Get the data on orders, customers, products, tracking numbers, shipping addresses, etc.
- Monitor and synchronize inventory levels
- Manage product listings
- Update prices automatically
- Send emails and notifications featuring new items, discounts, etc.
- Provide your clients with up-to-date statistics and reports
If you want to know more about API2Cart, contact us now by simply clicking on the button below. Also, you can download our 'eCommerce API Integration for Your Business' guide and get more valuable information.
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