What is Snipcart?
Explore how to implement Snipcart to manage cart and payment functions within a React e-commerce app. Understand how to embed Snipcart using CDN, configure it with API keys, and customize the shopping experience without building cart logic from scratch.
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Shopify and Snipcart, two highly regarded companies, have played a crucial role in making it incredibly simple to add e-commerce functionalities to any website or online application. Shopify was established in
Defining Snipcart
Snipcart is an e-commerce solution that allows businesses of all sizes to integrate shopping cart functionality into existing websites or web applications. We can integrate this carting system into any website using simple HTML and JavaScript codes. Snipcart does the following:
Manage e-commerce operations.
Provides a fully customizable frontend shopping cart.
Gives us access to its webhooks and APIs.
Gives us access to an entire merchant back office.
This means we can use Snipcart to handle e-commerce when creating a web page with whatever stack we want. We don't have to deal with the logic of carting from scratch or installing a complex library; instead, we use a dedicated library.
Snipcart is fully customizable, allowing us to change both the style of the cart and how it behaves using CSS and the Snipcart API. Since Snipcart is entirely HTML-based, it is straightforward to integrate into our website. We need to include the CDN in a script tag that the web page can access and then add the CSS classes and some attributes to our markup in order to use Snipcart.
Snipcart also makes it simple to accept payments in our shopping cart, including international payments through popular platforms such as Stripe, PayPal, and others. In conclusion, Snipcart makes it simple for us to implement a carting system for our website without wasting time or money. This lets us concentrate on the core development of our website.
Sign up with Snipcart
To begin using Snipcart, go to the official website and sign up for a free account by entering your email address. You’ll receive a verification email requesting that you click on a link. This will take you to a page where you can complete your registration by entering and verifying your password. You can choose not to fill in the website field.
If this is successful, it will direct you to your dashboard, where you’ll be required to enter some information. This is how your dashboard will appear:
This dashboard has many essential sections that help us track our products, set up our application, and much more. It also has a “TEST” and “LIVE” mode control at the top, which allows us to test our application before going “LIVE.” Using and getting started with Snipcart entails going through all the steps outlined below.
All we need to do is go ahead to install or embed Snipcart within our application so we can make use of it. Creating an account gives us an API key for both the “TEST” and “LIVE” modes.
Setting up Snipcart in a React application
The second step is to install Snipcart. Snipcart installation does not require an NPM package or anything other than embedding the Snipcart CDN.
The Snipcart CDN can be embedded in a few ways, but to get it to work with React, we will embed the CDN by first adding the script tags to our public/index.html file and then adding the div, which contains some configurations, to the App.js file. The public/index.html file is the starting point of our application and holds the root element. This means we can place our script tags here within the body tag.