How to make a shopping cart in Ontraport

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Ontraport is a fantastic tool with many, many features. But one feature that is not available in Ontraport and is often asked about, is the ability to have ‘true’ shopping cart. What I mean by a true shopping cart, is an experience like you get when you go to an online store and can browse a variety of products, choose which you want, update quantities, and then check out paying for whatever combination of products you have chose.

The video below shows how to create a more shopping-cart like experience in Ontraport. And the rest of this blog walks through the reasons and the steps, as well.

In Ontraport, historically, the way to sell products (whether digital or physical) has been to create an order form with a pre-set product or products, without much flexibility for the buyer to pick and choose. While you could work around that a bit by allowing a buyer to change a product quantity to zero, it was not very user-friendly; and you had to know what you were doing to make sure products weren’t sent to people who didn’t pay for them.

A few years ago, Ontraport added the Bump Offer block to its page builder. The main intended functionality of this block is to offer an additional or secondary product to someone who is already buying the primary product set on the checkout form. However, regular Ontraport users quickly realized that it could be used to create something closer to a shopping cart experience.

I have used this kind of setup in multiple ways. Here are some examples:

• A template store where customers can pick as many document templates as they need out of a list
• Forms selling tickets to an event where customers can pick from different ticket levels (standard, vip, etc.) and add additional tickets for a lower price
• Forms selling physical products where multiple designs are available

Here is a short video showing what that experience looks like:

To create this, you would take a few steps:

• Create an Ontraport page
• Add your branding, etc.
• Add an order summary element
• Set your gateway and invoice template
• Add a submit button

Now here is where we create the ‘cart’ functionality:

Add a bump offer block to your page

• Select the product, price, quantity, etc.
• Set the style and copy of your block. You can even add images

Add additional blocks for each product or variation you want to offer.

Once you have completed your setup, test adding each product and variation to the cart by checking the boxes on your live page, and make sure that the product, quantity, price, etc. match the descriptions in each block.

One important caveat to this setup is that coupon codes do not apply to products from bump offer blocks. It is a system limitation, so if you set up a cart page like this, you will not be able to offer coupons for special discounts on these purchases.

And there you have it! You have created a shopping cart with your Ontraport account.

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