Let’s Review Some of the Major Shopping Carts Available in the Market Today
The center of an e-Commerce online store lies in the existence of multiple shopping cart options to select from. Picking for the best and most secured shopping carts with its incorporated options is essential for any online business because it deals with the most valuable information of your customers’ such as the credit card details and social security numbers and many other personal data. In order for any online business to be successful and remain successful, it is extremely crucial for the business owner to be able to earn great trust from their customers so that they will have a successful long term business relationship.
There are multiple types of e-commerce online shopping carts which are available in the market, each comes with their own strength and weakness. Consumers need to be very cautious when it comes to picking the right type of shopping option with its incorporate features for their online business.
– Java shopping cart:
Advantage: Being content rich and usually are available with attractive interfaces.
Disadvantage: They are hard to be customized for individual used.
– ASP shopping cart:
ASP ( application service provider) shopping carts are remotely hosted by some kind of shopping cart software program which enable the user to create, maintain and update the web store in the centralized web-based data location.
Advantage: It is a robust e-Commerce platform which is durable and realible. The setup cost is low and does not required any investment in infrastructure.
– CGI shopping cart:
Advantage: They are supported by all major browsers
Disadvantage: They may be very hard to be setup and maintain
– Hosted shopping cart:
Advantage: a great business solution for small scale business, it is equipped with a simple interface provided by a web host or a third party source that uses HTML code for the related functionalities and buttons on the cart. The required software and applications will come all in one solution.
Disadvantage: It is highly expensive and not as flexible as own hosted store.
– Fully integrated shopping cart:
Advantage: The most popular type of all options due to its multiple features which are user-friendly and easily being utilized for customization to fulfill different business needs such as the ability to calculate the expected shipping cost for a delivery to a specific destination, customer review forum, product show-case and exhibition for new customers etc.
– PHP shopping cart:
Advantage: This is now available with a licensed version of their software when you sign up for their service, which is useful for developers who wish to integrate this high quality shopping software into their existing website on their own servers. There are a lot of powerful features available through the PHP shopping options such as real-time inventory tracking, the ability to hide related pricing from unregistered customers, calculation of real-time shipping quotes, Automated tax calculations by different countries and many many more options.
– Merchant service shopping cart:
Advantage: setup is simple and easy as no programming is required
Disadvantage: Transaction fees is higher, the business or company name associated with the items sold will be the merchant service and not yours, the customers may get confused and expect this to be a dispute as the merchant service name is unrecognizable to them.
