A crucial development in ecommerce has been the shopping cart - taking its name from the store grocery cart has been a simplified analogy which buyers have quickly adopted and adapted to, however, the reality is much more complex. Shopping carts are the vital component of any effective ecommerce website because they handle the ordering and payment process which allows a website to transact business online - without a shopping cart mechanism, an ecommerce website is simply a dead end leading into old world commerce.
There are three major types of shopping cart - an ordering system; a store building system, and customized transaction systems - all based around a software platform capable of running on the website hosting server.
Ordering System Solutions
The heart of a shopping cart system is the ordering component which provides the functionality for selecting products to purchase,calculates the total cost including price, shipping and taxes and then handles the payment mechanism (usually integrating credit and debit card approval and verification) until finally, it returns the order confirmation to the buyer.
Some Shopping cart
integration only include the ordering component, though you can create a "buy" button for insertion on your website product pages. When a customer clicks on the "buy" button, this takesthe customer to a secure server (not necessarily the same server as your website is hosted on) and allows for safe payment of the goods. Once the customer has completed the order and payment process, the ordering solution will then return the customer back to the ecommerce website.
Store Building Solutions
When you have an extensive product range, possibly extending to hundreds or thousands of products, a simple ordering system is not going to be up to the task of promoting, presenting and managing a myriad range of products and sale types. You are going to need a more sophisticated solution which can handle all the varied ordering scenarios but includes a Content Management System (CMS), which is also known as Catalog Management System in some circles.
A CMS will create a website and the associated content, including product pages and content, usually based on standardised templates which allow you to quickly add new products and edit existing ones very quickly. This allows you to control and manage the look and feel of your ecommerce website and to manage multiple changes very quickly, such as price changes, special offers, discounts, end-of-line sales and new product ranges.
Customized Ecommerce Solutions
There are two sub-categories of customized shopping cart software - the first deals primarily with managing business-to-business (B2B) sales and the second, membership database solutions.
The majority of off-the-shelf shopping carts are designed for retail solutions only and they cannot readily be altered to cater for B2B scenarios. B2B shopping carts need to be able to manage customer accounts which provide customer access to the appropriate parts of the shopping cart and website and provides information such as order history, order status and delivery issues, credit taken and available. In essence, the individual customer account data stored in your system is being opened up for access (but not with authority to alter) your internal account and customer data.
A second feature required for B2B shopping carts not generally found on retail solutions, is the ability to provide the customer with pricing flexibility within a set range (depending on order volume and price levels), as well as any contractually negotiated pricing and order agreements.
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