Everyone has been stuck in an extremely long line at a grocery store or mall at one point or another.  No matter how good the shopping experience, getting stuck at the checkout is going to be what ruins your day.

While turning to the internet for most purchases can help you avoid the pitfalls of shopping centers, a poorly designed or unsecured online checkout can be much worse than standing in line all day.

Every ecommerce site should pay close attention to its shopping cart and checkout functions, and with tons of open source and subscription options available, there’s no reason to ever have a problem checking out online.

Open for Business

When the Mudbug Media team first started working on an ecommerce site for local lifestyle bag manufacturer Hadaki, the first thing we looked at was how to improve their shopping cart feature. 

After comparing the merits of nine different services, both open source and subscription, we settled on OpenCart, a PHP-based online shopping cart system.  It turned out to be a perfect blend of form and functionality with all of the security features we were looking for.

OpenCart already has persistent form validations built into the software to protect against database injections and cross-site scripting attacks, giving you a built in level of security, but we decided to go one step further.  To make sure all transactions are secure, we used a secure socket layer protocol during checkout so all information remains private.

Checking Out

Over 50 percent more visitors have checked out Hadaki’s site since we revamped the shopping cart, and more visitors generally translates to more sales.  Word of mouth matters in the ecommerce world, and if people are having trouble checking out or if they feel shaky about typing in their credit card number, online sales will quickly plummet.

By paying close attention to every step of the online shopping experience including the checkout, retailers can make sure customers end up glad they went online in the first place.

I really think open source is the way to go when it comes to shopping carts.  A project or application being brought into open source will need to have solid standards already implemented.  Open source also means that people, most likely the ones actually using the program, are constantly making updates, so you end up with very user-friendly upgrades, and that’s half the battle.

OpenCart is also highly customizable, so it’s really easy to seamlessly blend the shopping cart into the rest of the site.  This creates a continuity of service that allows customers to easily navigate through the complete shopping experience.

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