If You Sell Products or Services Online You Need A Shopping Cart
The shopping cart is a vital part of any ecommerce site. A shopping cart allows your site visitors to browse your site, buy products or services and have a place to hold items while they continue to browse.
A shopping cart is a software application that gives your customer freedom to browse, to add or delete products from a virtual shopping cart and to see a running total of how much they have selected in dollar amount.
A shopping cart integrates with the rest of your site. A shopping cart may have links that allow the customer to search your site for specific items, see what is in their cart, even save their cart’s contents for later.
Shopping carts are designed in many programming languages. You can run a shopping cart on many different servers such as the Windows Web servers, Unix, and others. You can also place the shopping cart on your own web Server by transferring the files using any FTP program.
A shopping cart typically includes a database for storing information such as your product description; customer data, order information and can display this information for the customer on pages such as product detail page, checkout page, etc. Shopping carts also have an administration area where you can manage your store such as adding product, set up shipping and payment options, or process orders.
There are two parts or components to the shopping cart – the part that the customer sees, called the storefront and the administrative section where the owner manages the store. Features of a shopping cart will vary from one shopping cart company to another.
Basic features that most shopping carts should have are: A catalog of products, a search feature to locate items easily, a customer service area where customers can get help locating or buying products, special pages such as sales, featured products, a specific brands.
The administration section of the shopping cart is where the owner manages the store and should include general settings such as product, categories, currency, date format, language etc. and a module for creating and editing products, a place for managing product categories, and a section for managing options such as color or size. Another section that is important is the price setting and changing area. There also needs to be a module for managing orders such as those that need processing, those that are pending, and those that have shipped as well as a returns section.
Now that you know a little bit more about the shopping cart, you can understand just how important it is to have a shopping cart on your Website if you are selling products or services.
