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Making Sure you have Top Website Shopping Carts

The Right Website Shopping Carts for Your Business

Technology has ushered in website shopping carts, which has revolutionized the way trade is transacted on the internet, commonly referred to as ecommerce. It goes without saying that the name is coined from the shopping baskets found in the physical stores. For those who wish to sell more than one item on the internet, you will need to set up an online store.

Automated and highly organized shopping experience for the shoppers is achieved through a website shopping cart. It allows the on-line shopper to freely browse items, conveniently make multiple selections. Then, it calculates all the charges including: shipping expenses; the taxes and other related costs upfront. It has seen not only the automation of ordering and payment, but also the accounting and warehousing.

Website Shopping Carts for a Better Business Site

The website shopping carts have been classified into two major categories.

Licensed software: this software is one that is downloaded and installed on the local server. The developer provides a license to the one downloading it. Although there are free shopping carts on the market, the licensed one are usually associated with a one-time fee. The main advantage of having these licenses is that the software is hosted on your server. Most licensed products are usually open sourced, which allows you to modify the software to the way that you feel best suits you.

Hosted service: in this situation the software is never downloaded. It’s situated in the developers’ server and if you wish to run it in your website, you have to access it remotely. Instead of owning the product- website shopping cart- the website owner is furnished with a service. A fee is paid after a given duration in exchange to the service provided; it’s commonly referred to as the application service provider (ASP) software model.

Most of these products usually have pre-defined templates, which you can choose from to have a customized look and feel. The advantage that this holds over the licensed one is that the developer gets to keep the website shopping carts up to date. This caters for security and addition of new features.

Other Website Shopping Carts

There are numerous off the shelf solutions such as osCommerce, Magrnto, Zen Cart, Virtuemart, Batavi, Avactis, and others. There are also advanced platforms like interchange. Website shopping carts go a long way in inventory control hence providing you with an automated report.

Today’s’ shopping carts also act as a marketing tool. They offer information on affiliate programs as well as social media marketing. The software is also in a position to create gift certificates and other unique incentives. They keep track of the amount of traffic on a particular page, which will go a long way in increasing conversion rate.

Through encrypting information, and providing credible bodies to process credit card information, the website shopping carts earns the on-line shoppers’ trust. This can make or break a prospective sale. When choosing a shopping cart for your website, pick one that will enable your customer to purchase as easy as possible. It should have lots of features and most importantly should be one of the secure website shopping carts.


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This entry was posted on Monday, February 27th, 2012 at 11:22 pm and is filed under Types. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.