As developers, we want to have 100% control over the look and feel of the shopping cart and the product catalog. We want to be able to display and publish the products in a seamless manner that respects the brand and the design of the website.
When using Snipcart, you have access to a shopping cart that is pure HTML/CSS, injected directly into your website's source code. You basically turn any links in your HTML into buyable buttons you display on your product pages. Those buttons will make our shopping cart pop. The cart itself can be skinned and customized by any developer: there are no creative limits! And since the checkout process is injected into your website, the customer never leaves your website and goes through a seamless navigating and shopping experience.
On the other hand, the catalog and products are managed within your CMS or static site generator, like any page and content type you already use and manage. So adding a product page basically means adding content. This means Snipcart will work seamlessly both on traditional CMS like WordPress and modern site generators like Gatsby or Nuxt.
As for the administration panel, it’s hosted on Snipcart. By logging into their dashboard, merchants will be able to configure their accounts and track their sales, payments, and shipping. In other words, we think we’ve nailed the best of both worlds: the cart is fully customizable and is “installed” – it’s a basic JavaScript inclusion – within the CMS and the invisible administration section that is hosted. Yet again, using our API, you could retrieve Snipcart data information and display it within your CMS.
So yes, Snipcart does require a minimum of HTML and CSS knowledge, and it’s certainly not a service that suits everybody. We’ve built Snipcart as developers and we know that it’ll be more suitable for developers who want to offer simple shopping carts to their customers without compromising the CMS or design of the whole online shop.