If you are going to make an online store, you need a shopping cart. For example, you can learn more about one at a site like 1ShoppingCart.com. The shopping cart allows people to save the things that they want to buy. Rather than being forced to pick items one at a time and purchase them, they can put them all together and buy the entire selection at once. This makes life easier for them, and it contributes to the way that they shop; they will buy more items if they can do it this way than they will if they cannot use a cart.
What’s more, they now expect to have a shopping cart when they use an online store. It is true that older stores may not have used this technology, but virtually everyone does now. If you do not have a cart that is connected to your store, people are going to be very surprised. They are not going to like the shopping experience. You may not get them to come back and make a second purchase, which is always going to be your goal. You need to create repeat customers, and those that like your store are going to come back again.
People also use shopping carts just to see how much it would cost to buy things. They will do this when they are essentially window shopping, not planning on putting the order through at the time. They will grab a number of items that they are thinking about buying and add them to the cart so that they can see the total cost. They might even run things through all the way to the step before submitting the order so that they can see the cost of taxes and shipping. They want to know what it will cost so that they can think about whether or not they are really going to put that order in at a later date.
This is how you draw people back to your site. Let them use the cart in this way. If you can, let them save the cart so that they do not even have to fill it back up the next day. After they look at the price and then think about it for the night, they will come back, select the cart, and then put that order in to you in just a few seconds.
