Easy Shopping Cart Software for building Ecommerce Sites

Ecommerce and online shopping is growing fast and replacing the way people shopping for holiday. Electronic shopping means buying and selling of services and products online; over the Internet, or through computer network.

Due to the increase in the use of the Internet and easy payment methods, e-commerce has grown remarkably. Ecommerce websites are often built using shopping cart software either in PHP or Flash. Shopping cart software can help people build shops quickly with online purchases functions.

It is often refer to as "shopping cart" in American or the shopping basket in UK.

A website shopping cart software often builts website to allow customers shopping online, select the items they would like, placed into a shopping cart, and then checkout with credit card or their PayPal accounts. The cart software automatically calculates the total amount the entire list of items comes up to, which includes handling, shipping charges and taxes (VAT), if any, as applicable.

Most online shopping cart software builts cart pages with two main elements i.e. the Storefront and the Cart Administration. The storefront is that part of the website that is accessed by customers to view or purchase products and services. This information is provided with respect to the data stored in the database (e.g. MYSQL).

The owners can change the design layout of the storefront to integrate it with the homepages.

The cart administration is that part of the website that is accessed by the webmaster who manages the online shop. The cart administration part is used to add, modify or delete products or services details with respect to the shipping, cost, discount, special promotion, affiliate tracking and other related items.

The cart administration part can be accessed through a web browser or through a desktop-based application. The actual shopping cart system should also supports secure transactions for the customers using credit card to make payments. Most transactions are processed by payment gateways such as PayPal or WorldPay, who often provide direct links for easy integration into a shopping cart system. The shopping cart software can be categorized into two types, i.e. desktop based software or web hosted service.

The desktop based software is downloadable from the Internet and installed on the computer, so user can access it anytime. For hosted solutions, often payments are required on a monthly or annual basis. While searching online, you might find many different cart software providers, offering cart software under different names scuh as e-store software, ecommerce solution, storefront software, e-commerce software, flash cart software or online store software.