What is a Shopping Cart and Why do I need one?

Shopping cart software is the crucial nexus between having a site with products or services to sell and receiving money in your bank account. The internet shopping cart is now as necessary for ecommerce as its plastic or steel namesake is for brick and mortar commerce.

Primarily a shopping cart has three tasks: keeping track of all the products a customer has chosen to buy, tallying the total cost of those items together, and receiving payment for those items at checkout. Some of the more advanced carts will have extra features such as inventory management, shipping cost calculators, digital downloads, affiliate tracking, and other features (you can find out what they do in the glossary section of the site).

Anyone who runs an online business where more than one product or service is sold should have a shopping cart. From a merchant selling Troll dolls on a small scale to Amazon.com. The decision of which cart to buy is up to the individual business, but anyone who has a product or service to sell will quickly recognize that shopping cart software is the best option for taking orders and receiving payment.

Let’s use an example of what a good Cart software can do:

You have a store that sells nuts and bolts and you want to go online. You can use cart software to build a catalog of your goods and post them up on your website. A customer comes in and starts looking around. Your cart software will keep track of where they were going and what they were looking at. As the customer selects merchandise they want to buy, the cart keeps track of the items and the quantity selected, and tallies a running total. At checkout, the cart can recommend other items the customer might want to buy (if they selected all bolts, the cart might recommend the nuts that go with them), calculate the tax due, and calculate the shipping costs. The cart will then take all the payment information (credit card, check, etc.) and submit the payment request through a payment gateway. Once it has been authorized, the cart places an order to the bolt warehouse, finalizes the payment from the customer, and produces a receipt for the customer.

The advantage of a cart is that it has already incorporated a variety of difficult functions into a single program. Buying a cart is a far better solution than trying to do all of these functions manually or with your own program.