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What is Snipcart?

Finding an ecommerce solution that fits your business can be challenging. There are plenty of options out there including Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento and WooCommerce.
If you are a looking for a more customizable solution and one that’s increasingly preferred by website designers, you might want to take a closer look at Snipcart.

What Is It?

Snipcart is a relatively simple ecommerce solution that lets you add a small piece of code to your existing website and create a shopping platform complete with products, payment gateways and inventory management.

How Does Snipcart Work?

Snipcart can change any website into an e-commerce platform. When you sign up, you are given a small element of code which is normally copied into the head tag of the HTML. All you then need to do is define your products and you can immediately start selling them online.
At the front end of your website, the user will see a product and a buy button, they simply click on this and it takes them to the Snipcart and can pay without even leaving your site. With Snipcart, you can decide how this looks, whether you are selling one or two items or have a large product line.
The solution also comes with a merchant dashboard which lets you keep track of sales and manage performance. You can integrate other systems and even run promotions and special offers.

Who Is It For?

Snipcart is mostly aimed at web designers and developers who want to provide alternatives to the major ecommerce platforms for their clients. If you have some HTML and CSS coding experience, however, you can use the software to set up a simple store for your blog, business site or organisation.

The Benefits of Snipcart

Ecommerce-as-a-service products such as WooCommerce can be difficult to set up and usually come with a fairly large monthly cost. Snipcart can be set up pretty quickly if you have a modicum of coding experience and it’s cheap to run.

For low volume sales, Snipcart charges 2% per sale or £8 a month depending on which is the higher. You can also organise custom payment solutions if you have a high volume of sales.

Snipcart works very well for sites that can’t justify the higher monthly fees many e-commerce sites ask for. This is especially true if you only have a few products that you want to have on sale and don’t want the trouble of setting up Shopify or Magento store that sits outside your normal website.

It certainly works for sites that don’t have a central focus on ecommerce but want that capability added without too much trouble.

One of the big benefits of this kind of headless commerce system is that it can be seamlessly integrated with other systems like ERPs and CRMs. It’s also made for an omnichannel approach and allows you to reach your audience in a variety of different ways.

Finally, Snipcart offers much more control over how your product attributes are defined while still creating a seamless browsing experience for your customers.
If you are searching for an alternative to Shopify, Magento or any of the other ecommerce-as-a-service platforms, one that you can tailor to your needs, have up and running in next to no time and still have the store management tools and security you need for online sales, Snipcart is well worth a closer look.