Snipcart: The Easiest Way to Quickly Integrate a Shopping Cart to Any Website in 5 Minutes

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Are you looking for a simple yet robust tool to transform your website into an online ecommerce store? Snipcart is your answer. Continue reading to understand why!

What is Snipcart?

Snipcart is the ecommerce tool that makes it easy to transform any website into an ecommerce site. This tool is a powerful shopping cart platform that is easy to install. While it is significantly designed more for experienced developers, it provides a simple way for these techs to integrate a shopping cart to any website they are working on. 

The great thing about Snipcart is that it makes it simple to build on your existing website or platform rather than starting all over on one of the more specific ecommerce platforms such as WooCommerce, Shopify, or OpenCart Marketplace.

Snipcart uses Javascript and HTML code to simply integrate with whatever platform your ecommerce store is already using. This inclusion means no lengthy migration processes or potentially lost website visitors from transitioning sites. 

A view of the Snipcart dashboard

Snipcart Features

Website Design and Synchronization

While Snipcart isn’t a genuine website building software, it does offer an array of customization options.

While you need to know your way around HTML and CSS, with Snipcart, you can quickly design a shopping cart that integrates seamlessly in style with your website. While Snipcart technically creates a separate site for your payment processing, your customers will have a seamless purchasing experience with this level of customization.

Although the actual shopping cart section does maintain a default theme, it’s clear, concise, and professional for any website.

Payment Processing

Snipcart makes it easy to handle payments across your ecommerce website. With this software, you can choose to have amounts directly deposited in your account or through their partnerships with other third-party payment gateways. These include Paypal, Authorize.net, Stripe, NetBanx, PayMill, and Pin Payments. 

This software also supports a range of international currencies as long as your payment gateway accepts them. Along with this, they do offer the opportunity to feature currency-specific prices across your site. This feature makes a real difference for successful businesses with clients from around the world. 

Similar to many payment processors, Snipcart does take a 2.9% fee from the transaction value on top of the $.30 charge after each payment.

Inventory Management Dashboard

With the processing of so many payments, Snipcart is uniquely designed with a user-friendly backend. The Snipcart dashboard is where you can manage orders and product inventory. Through this inventory management dashboard, you can quickly and clearly see analytics of orders, sales, customers, products, subscriptions, taxes, and shipping. This dashboard gives you a clear view of what changes you may need to better your business. 

Directly from your Snipcart dashboard, you can add new products to your shopping cart and process customer refunds, and edit and export orders.

Through the Snipcart dashboard, you can enable Google Analytics and cross-domain/subdomain shopping. This space is also where you can configure the email templates, checkout settings, notifications, and webhooks integrations.

A view of the Snipcart abandoned cart page

Abandoned Carts

Abandoned cart notifications are crucial for completing potentially lost sales. Snipcart features cart abandonment software that makes it easy to follow up with customers to catch that purchase hopefully. Through this software, you can find a comprehensive list of all the incomplete and abandoned carts for your store, including and filter them based on your need.

From there, you can either choose to reach out to these customers manually or through its automated recovery campaigns.

Recovery Campaigns

The recovery campaigns feature of Snipcart is an added-on benefit that trickles down from the abandoned cart feature. This feature makes it easy to develop and send targeted email campaigns to follow up with all abandoned cart customers. With Snipcart’s recovery campaigns, you can send up three different recovery emails with three extra time triggers.

This recovery campaign allows you to customize email templates with your business’ branding and style. You can design the recovery emails to deliver with personalized copy, call-to-actions, and exclusive discounts. With built-in automation, you are free to set the recovery campaign how you desire and then walk away!

This type of automation allows you to build customer relations and, of course, your business!

Security

For payment processing software, you would hope that the site is thoroughly safe and data is protected. Snipcart does just this and more through its protection levels for you and your customers. This software is equipped with SSL/HTTPS certificates that will genuinely protect all of your customer’s information and payment data.

It also has a monitoring system that crawls within its services to check for data breaches and security vulnerabilities constantly. Furthermore, credit card details are not processed through its servers for further protection.

Shipping

Snipcart offers shipping solutions with a carrier that will best suit your store’s distribution needs. You can choose to either enable fixed and custom shipping rates, or you can use API to provide the shipping logistics yourself.

The first option makes it easy to automate the shipping process and is ideal for those not wanting to dive too deep into it. You simply link your account with one of Snipcart’s ecommerce shipping solutions, including FedEx, USPS, UPS, Canada Post, Australia Post, and Purolator. Include information about the size and weight of the individual products and specify the shipping operations to automate the shopping process’s shipping aspect.

Details of the Snipcart pricing plan options

Snipcart Pricing

Snipcart offers four different scalable pricing plans designed for small to large online businesses.

Standard Plan: This plan is called standard for a reason. The majority of users choose this plan for an all-encompassing solution for adding a shopping cart to their website. The plan includes unlimited products, product variants & discounts, and domains/subdomains. It features a fully customizable shopping cart along with responsive tech support, the abandoned carts recovery feature, TaxCloud & TaxJar integrations, and the list goes on! 

This plan’s pricing is 2% per transaction or a flat $10 fee if your sales are under $500.

I am Special Plan: Snipcart’s larger plan includes all the Standard Plan features but offers an adapted pricing structure. This pricing change makes this plan ideal for more significant ecommerce sites that require customized needs. This plan’s pricing is a reduced % and then a fixed fee for stores with high volume sales.

Non-Profits & Schools Plan: This plan is developed for organizations that don’t have as high of budgets. This special designation is the standard plan but with a lowered fee of 1.5% and no minimum $10 monthly rate even for those with sales under $500.

Crowdfunding Plan: Snipcart is also lenient for crowdfunding projects and offers a discounted rate for ecommerce websites supporting those. This plan also lowers the transaction fee to 1.5% and eliminates that pesky minimum $10 monthly rate.

Unique Special Needs Plan: Then, to be even more inclusive, Snipcart offers a truly flexible plan to cover all other bases. In this pricing plan, they give the option to discuss other alternative pricing methods so that you can find a solution that works! How’s that for customer service?

What You Need to Get Started

Snipcart is fully designed to provide you and your business a fast and efficient way online to get a shopping cart added to your site.

These are the pre-requisites you need to take before you can fully integrate a shopping cart to your website:

  • A Snipcart account setup
  • A website with the correct Snipcart plugin installed
  • A Snipcart test API key
  • The list of your store’s products to sell

Even if you’re not quite ready to start selling yet, Snipcart features a testing side so that you can learn and try out the features before you make it live on your site.

Our Snipcart Review

Snipcart is an excellent ecommerce tool for website owners looking to build on their current site versus starting new. While it does require a developer to get the software set up with the intended website, it is simple to use for almost any tech level. Snipcart makes it easy to optimize your website to process payments in a safe and efficient system.

For being such a powerful yet user-friendly tool, we highly recommend it for all our students!

A visual of Justin using Snipcart to optiize an ecommerce website

Building a Successful Ecommerce Business Beyond the Website

Building an ecommerce store is more than just having an optimized website or taking payments. Running a truly successful online business includes doing your proper ecommerce product research, managing a robust organic & paid marketing plan, and so much more. When you are just getting started, it is helpful to have someone who has already been down this road, an ecommerce coach for example, to help guide you through every problem and help to find the solution.

BeyondSixFigures is a company dedicated to helping new and advanced ecommerce entrepreneurs start and scale their businesses. The head of the company, Justin Woll, offers a Personal Mastermind Experience to provide 1-on-1 mentorship to prospective ecommerce experts.

Take the right step to invest in your business’s future by booking your FREE personalized call with Justin Woll himself. Click here to make your appointment today!

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