Do I really need an online shopping cart? Of course you don’t need to have a shopping cart. No more than a retail store needs to have a cash register. But your online store should have a shopping cart, for the same reason that a retailer should have a cash register. Time is money.

Let’s say you don’t get an online shopping cart for your online retail store. First, you spend weeks making and loading web pages onto your domain for every product you offer. When your website is finally up, you have to stay by the phones and check your email constantly. Why? Because this is how everyone will place their orders, and people want immediate responses.

Once you take the order by phone or email, you will have to go to the UPS, Fed Ex, or US Postal Service website and calculate shipping charges. Then, you have to calculate tax using a sliding tax scale. Once you have their total, you have to create an invoice to email to them. Now, it’s time to take payment.

You’ll take their checking account or credit card information over the phone or through email. This, by the way, will rarely happen because people are worried about security and identity theft. Once you have their information, you will have to manually send it through the merchant account to see if it clears. Once it clears, you will have to ship out the order, and log the information in your inventory management and bookkeeping systems.

You have just spent at least two hours processing one order.

Now let’s look at an online shopping cart. You spend a few days uploading your product information into the shopping cart and connecting the shopping cart to your merchant account. When your customers place their orders, taxes and shipping are automatically calculated. You will get more orders because you are processing payment electronically, through a secure server and a verified merchant account. You receive information through your email or on your server regarding the order, spend a few minutes packing it, and send it off. There is nothing more to do, because your online shopping cart is fully integrated with your inventory management and bookkeeping systems.

You have only spent about five minutes processing one order.

See the difference? With the time, effort, and frustration that you can save by using an online shopping cart, why wouldn’t you have a shopping cart for your online business?