7 reasons why an embeddable cart and checkout might be right for you

If you’ve got a content site or a blog that talks about your products and services, but you have not yet turned these channels into transactional streams, then an embeddable cart and checkout may just be the solution you’re looking for.

Generating demand is one of the most important aspects of online sales. The most successful brands realized long ago that selling across multiple touch points and utilizing any digital space to make a transaction possible is the easiest and most efficient strategy to reach out to a variety of customers.

The embeddable cart and checkout enables your customers to shop and pay for items directly from your existing website without leaving the page. It is a great way to expand your brand’s reach and add another channel to your existing ones without compromising consistency.

There are many embeddable cart solutions out there to consider, like Snipcart, Shoppable, Foxy.io, or Stripe Checkout. And now, Elastic Path has created Shopkit to join the ranks. Shopkit is actually one of a few embeddable cart and checkout that allows you to purchase within the same page your consumer sees your product, that is also backed by a full commerce API.

Here are some reasons why an embeddable cart and checkout might be just what you’re looking for:

• It makes any website shoppable

You can inject an embeddable cart and checkout on any website to make any digital space shoppable, be it a blog site, event, brochureware or a product or service review site. Interact with your buyers right there, at the moment of inspiration when they’re most receptive. The embeddable cart and checkout offers your consumer a means of purchase where they have not been able to transact before, therefore, broadening their shopping journey. This is exactly what’s important to customers nowadays; they want to shop how they want and when they want without any constraints, typically using at least 3 touchpoints to complete their customer journey.

• It’s aimed at people with limited-to-no coding knowledge and experience

Many embeddable carts on the market are very simple and straightforward to implement. They are designed to be used by start-up brands and retailers, bloggers, and marketers with limited-or-no coding knowledge as a simple way to start selling without the need for a development team, money and full commerce platform.  

• It appeals to impulse buyers

Impulse buyers love to make a purchase in the spur of the moment. But the moment is fleeting, and there’s a very thin line between the feeling of accomplishment upon buying a product before the feeling of regret creeps into the buying process, especially if checkout is taking too long. And once an impulse buyer makes a purchase, any potential buyer’s remorse gets instantly replaced by a strong feeling of pleasure of ownership.

The embeddable cart and checkout is an excellent choice to appeal to impulse buyers. The entire checkout process is quick and painless and happens directly on the website without taking the buyer out of their experience.

You do, however, have to be careful with embedded cart choice here. Some options out there actually take you away from the page or even website to complete the transaction. Elastic Path Shopkit and Snipcart, however, have implemented on-page checkout modals to overcome this possibly janky experience offered by other providers.

• It can provide a unified checkout process throughout all touchpoints

With Elastic Path Shopkit, you can customize your embeddable cart and checkout, so the checkout process is the same across all of your channels, making the shopping experience unified, and thus, letting the user discover the true power of omnichannel.

• Your customers can come back to abandoned carts

With solutions like Elastic Path Shopkit or Snipcart, the cart doesn’t purge immediately when abandoned. Rather, it stores information on added cart items, so that it can display them in case a buyer comes back on the site. This caters for many different scenarios where a user is involuntarily taken away from the website, and makes the shopping experience even more pleasant for your customers. Let them know you think of them!

We’ve covered the main reasons why you’d want to think about embedding a cart or checkout into your content experience. However, there are additional reasons why Elastic Path Shopkit might be the best option for you.

• You see your commerce requirements scaling as your business grows

The Shopkit embeddable cart and checkout can grow together with your business and your customers’ needs. There’s an entire stack of powerful APIs and third party integrations that power Shopkit, so as you require a more scalable commerce experience or want to expand to new use cases, the Elastic Path headless commerce APIs can be utilized to make sure you get the best-of-breed tools to speed up the development process and work seamlessly across many channels without having to migrate your data or business logic to any other commerce platform.

• One button, many functionalities hidden behind it

The embeddable cart and checkout is not only that. Behind a few lines of code hide many fantastic features that you may recognize if you already use Elastic Path: ability to add custom fields, apply promotions, integrate any payment gateway and any tax calculation system.

With the vast number of embeddable cart and checkout solutions out there, you probably want to decide which option is best for you. Check out this comparison guide on Elastic Path Shopkit, Shopify Buy Button, Snipcart, Shoppable to help aid your decision. In addition, read more about Elastic Path as an eCommerce service, specializing in carts and check out in our ultimate eCommerce Buyer's Guide.

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