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Shopping Carts: Shopping Carts |
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The center of an e-commerce online store is the shopping
cart. Shopping basket, online shopping
cart, web store, e catalog and shopping carts
are appropriate metaphors of the familiar trolley used in supermarkets. People
go to supermarkets, push shopping carts through the aisles, pick and choose the
items needed. They add and remove items from the carts without much effort or
thought. Shopping cart software is
an effort to translate the ease and control over purchasing in the real world
(to which people are so accustomed), to the electronic world of online shopping.
It is essentially an extension of a simple order form. A simple order form is
generally limited in the amount of interactivity it gives to the customer, and
allows a limited number of products and options.
There are several different
types of e-commerce online shopping cart available, each with their own advantages
and disadvantages:
ASP Shopping Cart Software
(ASP) stands for
active server pages the language was written by Microsoft and provides a robust
e-commerce platform. ASP Shopping Carts are easy to build edit and manage.
The MonsterCommerce shopping cart software
is written in ASP and provides an easy to use "back-office" to manage
all components of your e-business.
- CGI Shopping Cart:
The major advantage is that they are supported by all of the major browsers.
The disadvantage is they can be hard to set-up and maintain, can be slow, and
waste bandwidth and system resources.
- Cookie Shopping Cart:
These types of e-commerce carts are easy to setup and maintain. They are faster
than traditional CGI shopping cart and use less bandwidth and system resources.
The disadvantage is they are not supported by browsers that do not support cookies,
and become ineffective in cases where the user chooses to turn off cookies in
their browsers.
- Java Shopping Cart:
The advantages are
that they can have a content rich and visually pleasing interface (and not limited
by HTML). The limitations of this shopping cart software are that
since you have to build your store inside the applet, they are hard to customize
and can be slow.
- JavaScript Shopping Cart:
The advantages
are that they are fast, easy to set-up and maintain, easy to customize, save bandwidth,
and save system resources. The disadvantage is they are not supported by browsers
that do not support cookies and JavaScript. Furthermore, it can be difficult to
set-up large shopping carts by this approach.
Have time to spare? Visit
a web page dedicated to shopping cart abuse.
The question, then, you will have to ask yourself is:
do I need shopping cart software tools
that come equipped with a turnkey shopping cart? For a small number of products
with few options, a full-fledged shopping cart might not be necessary. In such
as case, a smaller customized page that accepts credit cards may be sufficient.
If you have a large number of products with many variations and options, it may
be inconvenient to include them all in a single page. In such a case, it is preferable
to display the shopping cart products over a variety of pages, which would include
a navigation system for customers to move around, select items as needed (and
remove items), and ultimately, will be able to checkout. This would require state
persistence from page to page, and thus an actual full-fledged shopping
cart solution.
It is recommended that you choose the e-commerce store
software based on features needed along with the number of products contained
within your shopping cart. |
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