What Is Online Shopping Cart Software?
Shopping or buying cart software is something, which is used mostly in the e-commerce industry. This software mimics the behavior of a ‘normal’ brick-and-mortar store like Walmart. What does a shopper do when entering Walmart? They pop in, pick up a shopping cart and stroll through the isles for the products required.
With an online shopping cart, rather than browse through the physical isles, you browse the pages and once you see something for purchase the shopper adds it to their cart and at the end through the checkout. This software helps people in making any kind of purchase online. As the shopping concludes, this software calculates the total purchases including the handling & shipping charges along with applicable taxes on the selected products.
An online shopping cart system usually comes with a database having all those details regarding the products and customers. It also has a storefront, which shows all details to the visitor and an administration area, which helps the store supervisor to oversee the store. The store administrator can make necessary changes and adjustments such as adding and deleting products, discounts, categories, payment settlement and so on. As most part of the information is already available in the database, the shopping cart software creates the pages almost instantly.
While looking for online shopping cart solution, there are many things to consider. In fact, a large number of choices that a person finds online may seem very daunting at first. Nevertheless, the process can be made easier by being clear from the start about what is actually needed.
Naturally price is an important factor that you need to bear in mind, while looking for your best suited system. There is a huge difference between what is called a ‘hosted solution’ and buying (or downloading for free) an online shopping cart system.
A hosted solution typically includes everything you need to get your store up and running. Including the website itself, a huge line of products to fill your store, a payment gateway to accept credit cards and to also deposit the profit to the store owner. A monthly fee or flat rate fee is usually what most companies ask to pay for this software. Apart from this, there may be additional installation charges. The prices may vary from $100 per month to $500 for a single-time purchase. However, remember that a higher price always does not necessarily mean higher quality, because other factors may even affect the quality of the software as well.
Start-up costs and cripple a new online business before it even gets off the ground. Fortunately this can be overcome by considering an Open Source solution. Open Source means that developers/programmers from all over the world contribute to the application and is available free to anyone who wants it.
Besides the cost factor, there are several features available and a few of them include different types of payment systems, customization of cart and security features. These features also vary from one program to another, so it is essential to look for a software program which meets your requirements from the beginning to save frustration in the future.
Check out a comparison between the top 3 online shopping cart solutions.