Shopping cart software information

Shopping cart software is what ecommerce powered sites use to enable people to make purchases online. Sites which have this electronic shopping software allow online shopping customers to put items (read products) into a shopping basket which stores the contents in an online "cart". Upon "checkout" the ecommerce software calculates a total for the order including shipping and handling (i.e. postage and packing) and taxes, if applicable.

Detailed definition of shopping cart software
How these applications work is to provide a way of capturing and storing a customer's payment information (credit card, paypal, Google checkout), and depending on the site's real-time settings, the shopping cart platform then connects to a secure gateway provider, via a secure payment gateway, in order to enable secure and encrypted credit card transactions online.

Each shopping cart system has its own interface and usability concerns. Some setup must be done in HTML where you code directly into the website. As well, the shopping cart software may be of the type that is installed directly on the server which hosts the site, or it may also have a second module on a secure server which accepts sensitive ordering information. eStores are usually enabled with HTTP cookies which are used to remember visitors and their search attempts (plus things they add to their cart) or query strings which enable more rapid deployment of product catalogues.

Shopping Cart software can be generally categorized into two types of applications.
  1. Download-and-install on your own server. This is most often associated with a one-time fee, although there are many free products available as well.

  2. Hosted service: This is where you purchase a subscription from a hosted service provider and it is generally paid for on a monthly/annual basis; also known as the application service provider (ASP) software model. When you buy a cart this way, you usually get to choose a design from a set of predefined templates that a user can choose from to customize their look and feel. Colors can be chosen as well as logos etc. In some cases getting your web store up and running is as simple as selecting a few colors, uploading pictures of the products you are selling and entering in descriptions. If you are lucky, your cart platform may even allow you to import your product database right from an Excel file or another tab delimited file.
With WebCart" you can choose either type of ecommerce service. PLUS, even if you choose the hosted solution you get much more control than just a basic template. You have almost 100% control over the look and feel of your store design from the home page all the way down to the thank you page on checkout.

There are a few much more expensive options like Yahoo which charge a percentage of sales in addition to the monthly fee. One of the benefits of this model can be that the vendor continously keeps the software up to date for security patches as well as adding new features.