Shopping Carts
Shopping carts are the most visible part of e-commerce and consist
of the buy button you see next to the product that a visitor clicks
to make a purchase and handle the remainder of the transaction. This
software keeps track of all products that a person purchases and then
leads the buyer through the check out process of providing contact,
delivery and payment information.
After the transaction is complete the owner will receive an Email that
alerts them to the sale and the purchaser receives an Email summarizing
the purchase. To provided the required degree of safety, credit card
numbers should not appear in these e-mail messages.
There are a large number of choices that can be used on your site that
range in cost from free to many tens of thousands of dollars. Generally
there is an inverse relationship between cost and complexity of implementation.
One major source of shopper frustration can be the lack of persistence.
Persistence means that the gathered information is not lost if an Internet
connection should be dropped before a purchase is completed. The more
sophisticated carts will store this information either on the server
or on the shopper's PC so the information will still be available when
the shopper reconnects.
Other carts will generate pages on the fly from online databases which
may simplify page creation, but in most cases these pages cannot be
indexed by the all important search engines.
We have used a number of different programs for this process over the
years and have come to rely on Zen Cart and X-Cart depending on the needs of the store owner.
Zen Cart™ truly is the art of e-commerce; a free, user-friendly, open source shopping cart system. The software is being developed by group of like-minded shop owners, programmers, designers, and consultants that think e-commerce could be and should be done differently. There is no support available and if you have many many products set up can be a bit tedious.
X-Cart Shopping cart software trusted by thousands of successful business owners worldwide. 24x7 technical support is available to guarantee smooth launch. No PHP or other programming knowledge is required to set up and run a world class online store. X-Cart is template based software with open source code.
This means you can modify the look & feel and functionality of the shopping cart the way you need should you require any business specific features. Significant knowledge of PHP, HTML, and other technology is required for this, however. The software has no logical limitations on the number of products. The code is optimized for smooth performance with up to 20 000 products. Due to the fact that performance depends on server configuration special hardware and software optimization allows X-Cart to run with up to 500 000 products.
Features of X-Cart