Shopping cart programs

What is shopping cart programs? In a basic definition, it's a series of scripts that keep track of items a visitor picks to buy from your site until they proceed to the "checkout".

A popular misconception is that shopping cart programs handle the whole financial transaction, but they only really act as a front end which passes information via a secure connection (another service) to a payment gateway - a separate service altogether.

The payment gateway service then channels the requests and transfers throughout relevant financial networks, including the Internet merchant account with your bank. It then sends back confirmation or denial back to the shopping cart programs.

The good news is that there are literally hundreds of shopping cart programs available. The bad news is the same as the good. Sometimes, too many choices make it very difficult to make a decision - especially when all companies claim to have the superior product.

Now let’s speak about structure of shopping cart programs. They typically consists of two components:

• Storefront: the area of the Web store that is accessed by visitors to the online shop. Category, product, and other pages (e.g. search, best sellers, etc.) are dynamically generated by the software based on the information saved in the store database. The look of the storefront can normally be changed by the store owner so that it merges with the rest of the Web site (i.e. with the pages not controlled by the shopping cart software in use on the store).
• Administration: the area of the Web store that is accessed by the merchant to manage the online shop. The amount of store management features changes depending on the sophistication of the shopping cart software chosen by the merchant, but in general a store manager is able to add and edit products, categories, discounts, shipping and payment settings, etc. Order management features are also included in many shopping cart programs. The administration area can be:
• • Web-based (accessed through a Web browser)
  • Desktop-based (a desktop application that runs on the user's computer and then transfers changes to the storefront component).

Looking towards to all this words listed above we can truthfully say that shopping cart programs take an important place in Internet.

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