Best Cart Features & Workflows

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Evaluate & Plan the many features your business will need

The Many Needs of a Marketplace Shopping Cart

A key aspect of a marketplace eCommerce platform is the experience of going from reviewing a product or product SKU, to considering purchasing the product, the process of adding items to the cart, and then modifying the cart to make sure it has everything that's needed. The Clarity marketplace team has a lot of experience going through different scenarios with both B2B and B2C marketplace users and other custom scenarios we have encountered.

  • Customers having specific pricing information or location-based access.
  • Detailed requirements for each product within the cart.
  • Certain products they want to display as a unique line item in the cart regardless of quantity.
  • Configurations that cause multi-location distribution, leading to different pricing.

Those are things within the cart area that allow for a very streamline marketplace and are helpful when showing cart functionality with specific business rules in mind. When you're evaluating different marketplaces and how you want to configure your marketplace, you want to keep in mind some of the more complex long-term business rules that are required. Ideally, you will keep the customizations and specialized requirements to a minimum while still providing all the needed features and functionality. You don't want to cause too much friction, causing the cart process to be inaccurate compared to the traditional way the business operates. It doesn't represent the actual situation so there are a lot of diminishing returns that apply with cart functionality now.

Competitive Pricing & Accurate Tax Information

Remaining Competitive With Direct Integrations

In addition to the cart itself, a lot of carts show detailed information like shipping costs and a shipping estimator. That can be key to help someone determine if they're going to convert, if they're going to process a checkout, or if the shipping or the taxes are too high. If this causes the total product price to be too high it can be a challenge to drive users to convert. We recommend direct integrations with the ability to tie into external pricing data wherever possible, so the pricing is as accurate as possible. These integrations will be reflective of the latest market pricing for shipping and taxes should be similar across any marketplace site.

In order to have a competitive price, you need to have correct tax information. You need to make sure the business is able to submit and permit those tax payments. Apart from the legal aspects, you can ensure you’re matching competitors who should all be charging those taxes as well. Many marketplaces will have customs and duties for international marketplaces. That's a capability that you'll want to consider whether or not you need even if it's in the longer term. It's worth asking about delving into these capabilities during the configuration stage.

Driving More Conversions

Location-Based Discounts & Coupons

Location-based discounts and pricing is a powerful capability to help drive conversions. Many sites have different types of discounts. There are capabilities to set limits per user, by product category & byproducts, or possibly by vendor. There might be a traditional limited-time coupon discounts with promotions. A lot of times they're needed so that a promotion can drive traffic and revenue during a busy season. In addition, it would be possible to also do special buy X get Y free or discounted. Effectively reducing not just the product cost, but also things like the shipping and handling. For example; You buy X number of items, you get free shipping, etc. These are important capabilities inside of the cart you will want to consider when evaluating a marketplace.

We've gone into each of these topics in detail inside of our marketplace resource center and you can see links to those sections below. Ultimately, the cart itself isn't just what's on the cart page. There are several different standard requirements for the cart throughout the application. You will want to have a nice consistent header that shows the cart, and again, if desired can show the discounts in the taxes and shipping. Folks can get a quick glance view of what's in their cart, what’s contributing to the total cost shown for the cart and being able to apply things like discounts. We would typically refer to that as a micro cart or a mini cart and those are typically situated in a header on every page or possibly as a little icon in the footer in some cases or even a floating sidebar, depending on the configuration of the site.

Consumer-Specific UI/UX

Managing Unique Customer Information

Those are all standard options that should be present in any marketplace. You also want to consider the cart that shows up whenever somebody is in checkout, so that once somebody proceeds to checkout, they see no reason to back out of purchasing; you want a conversion-oriented design... Where the cart within the checkout page itself has very specific capabilities, some consumers will wish to modify their cart on the cart page. Depending on the scenario and your particular marketplace you might want full functionality, something that both the Clarity marketplace platform and many others can do for you. We encourage you to think about what your business will need and what customizations your business needs for the cart itself.

It's a key component to be able to translate customer specific information if needed. Customer specific pricing, possibly inventory status, etc. If a user has added a lot of items, they might benefit from a notification if they've added too many, causing some to no longer be in stock. The ability to quickly look up whether our clients will have a bulk upload where they'll actually have an Excel file or some kind of import file that they can bulk upload order items. Ultimately these are all things that you want to consider from the long-term perspective with your marketplace. You'll start to see requests from end users, and you will benefit by having these available off the shelf or at least highly configurable off the shelf solution features without having to create them from scratch. One of the strong suits of the Clarity eCommerce marketplace is that it really does have all of these and more as highly customizable components. It also has items that we've employed before on anywhere from a dozen to possibly hundreds of implementations of the Clarity platform.

Your Marketplace Experts

Clarity Can Help

We encourage you to reach out to us. If you would like to discuss anything or have any questions about the best practices for your cart component within your marketplace, Clarity can help guide you through the entirety of your marketplace lifespan. In addition, we have provided guides below you can dig into to get more specific details on each of these topics above. We look forward to talking with you soon!

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