[advocacy-discuss] John Rosatti, What Is An eCommerce Shopping Cart?

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John Rosatti, What Is An eCommerce Shopping Cart?



Do you want to sell your products online? Are you not really sure where to
start? It is more than likely that you?ll need to get yourself some shopping
cart software, or develop your own. This software is the backbone of any
online store. It allows you to display your products online and let
potential customers make purchases from you.

Most shopping cart solutions comprise of 4 parts; the actually shopping
cart, a product catalogue, the checkout process and an administration panel
of some form.

The Product Catalogue is, as you would expect, the part of the store that
displays your products. This can range from a single hand coded HTML page
displaying a few products up to a massive multi-category store containing
thousands of products. Store with a large number of products normally use a
dynamic solution driven by a database, this allow information about the
products to be changed with simple database updates rather than making
changes to every page. These are commonly written in web scripting languages
such as PHP or Active Server Pages.

Without the shopping cart component of your store your customers will not be
able to make a purchase and hand over the cash. This part of the solution
allows your customer to add products to a virtual basket then checkout and
pay at a later point. Conceptually it?s the software works in exactly the
same way as a shopping basket in a supermarket, the customer browses through
the products on the shelves placing products they want into their basket.
When they are ready to finalise the purchase they take the basket to the
checkout. Once the customer has decided that they want to purchase the
products in their shopping cart then they must make a payment and hand over
shipping details. This is where the checkout process comes in. This process
allow you to integrate with your chosen billing gateway or provider and
collect the payment detail from the customer. Most eCommerce solutions
provide you with a number of options when it comes to billing integration
allowing you to choose a billing solution that fits your business model.

The final part of the software is the administration panel, the panel allows
store owners and selected staff to manage the running of the store and
perform administrative actions when required. It can perform a multitude of
actions but a number of common activities are:

- Setup The Store (payment solutions, shopping costs, etc) - Add/Update
Products - Process Orders - View Store Statistics and Reports - Manage
Customers

Most online store solutions available today incorporate all of the above
features (product catalogue, shopping cart, admin panel and checkout
process) into one easily installable and manageable package. More advanced
solutions include facilities to integrate with numerous payment gateways,
manager customer, customer self management options and much more. It is
important to make sure any shopping cart software that you choose has the
component parts that you require, so always checkout a demo of the software
because purchasing or deciding to use it.

 Ecommerce Shopping Cart Software is a one stop shop for all the information
you need about shopping cart software and ecommerce solutions. This site is
brought to you by Bennett Enable eCommerce Solutions
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