Shopping Carts

What is a Shopping Cart?

Shopping carts allow your customers to pick up items throughout your site and put them in virtual "shopping carts" just like at the supermarket. Shopping carts are essential to online store automation. Before they exit, your customers can confirm what's in their shopping carts, make changes, and pay for their merchandise.

The customer can view the contents of their cart, remove a specific product, or add an item to their cart at anytime by clicking on a link or button. Then when they are ready to purchase their items, they simply go to the "checkout" and pay for their purchases via a secure order form.

When an order is placed the shopping cart program sends emails simultaneously to the customer and the merchant.While the customer receives a confirmation detailing all the information regarding their order, the vendor or merchant receives the order notification.

Features to Look For

There are many important things to look for when deciding on a shopping cart solution for your online store. Some of the options you may want your shopping cart to provide are as follows:

• Ability to calculate shipping & handling
  
• Ability to calculate sales tax
  
• Credit card authorization (only if you are using a real time authorization service such as AuthorizeNet or Cybercash)
  
• Database integration/compatibility (if you plan on using a database driven shopping cart)
  
• Secure Server access - check with your webhost.
  
• Ease of use, adding, changing or deleting products and information when needed.
  
• Ease of Navigation for your customers
  
• Customization - so your store doesn't look exactly like everyone else's
  
• Choosing your Shopping Cart Program

How to choose a shopping cart?

This is the most difficult in my humble opinion. There are several different types available.

First, you need to decide where to put your shopping cart/website? Chances are you will be hosting your website with a webhosting company. If this is the case, you will need to find out if their servers are compatible with the software program you are interested in? Do they offer secure server access at no extra charge and what type of database can you use with their server? There are many things to consider when choosing a webhost for an e-commence site and we will help you with that in our WebHosting Recommendations page.

Some shopping cart providers require that you host the cart on their servers. This is sometimes a good idea and more than often not. Why? Because you end up paying a higher monthly fee than you would had you chosen a web hosting company who either a) already offered an e-commence ready hosting plan, or b) installed your shopping cart on your web hosts server (in your cgi-bin usually). This way, you pay no extra monthly fees and the only extra cost is the shopping cart program itself.

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