Shopping Cart

Shopping cart is an e-commerce software which is used to help people, who are making there purchases online. In other words it is a kind of basket which stores all the products till the person checkouts. At the time of checkout this software actually calculates all the charges including delivery and shipping charges too. It basically assist people who are making purchases online.

Basically this software helps the online clients to place all there items on cart, as it makes easy to to calculate the total price of the all the items(including all the taxes and extra services ) if the customer pays all the bills of the products by using credit cards then this software provides a secure platform using a payment gateway so as to make all the credit card transaction more safer. In order to make the software work properly some of the setup should be done within the “html” code of the site, the software must also be installed on the same server where the site has been hosted. In order to make the software work properly and still you don't know where to host the setup, install it in secure server which also accepts sensitive information of the customer.

Many of the shopping cart software run on query, i.e. they are dependent on input of the query string. Also in most of the server based applications of the shopping cart, data keeps on getting stored dynamically as the customer is choosing different products from the cart. When all the process of selection is over, and the user wants to checkout, then all stored information is accessed and the total amount including taxes like the shipping charges, delivery charges are calculated. This information is send to the customer and the customer is asked to make all the payments so that the product is made to deliver to him on time. The product is not released till all the dues are cleared. There are many advantages of the shopping carts like:

- All the shopping carts usually involve very low investments.
- It is very fast as compared to other e-commerce software.
- It requires no other software to get installed.
- It automatically gets updated.

Shopping carts too have certain limits like:
- If certain problem exist then as a user you cannot choose any other operator.
- Also it sometimes involves more investments if the software is to be upgraded
- Its source code cannot be easily accessed, hence changes cannot be made easily.

If you as a user are using a licensed software then you have the opportunity to move the software from one web hosting environment to another, but here one of the bigger problem is - it is not easily installed.