Shopping cart basics
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Revision date: 14 Dec 2005
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No matter what you are maintaining - a business website for yourself, your own company or some of your clients or partners, you will have to provide a way for the customers to make orders, pay for the goods, and for the site administrator to manage the orders and organize shipping. Special shopping cart software is a common solution for that. However, there's usually no need to make everything on your own as a wide range of ready-made solutions to choose from exists.
Overview
Nowadays business requires a rapid realization of your projects and innovations. New ideas take shape with the speed of sound, and if no one have thought of the same things you do, no surprise if in a short while somebody will. In this situation your inspiration and creativity in planning your business means nothing if it takes months to perform all necessary practical steps and start making online sales. So any kind of software which is helpful in saving your time and efforts is more than welcome for those who are willing to organize their own online storefront.
It's a very important part of the whole project to choose the shopping cart software. E-commerce business is much different from the traditional "off-line" trading, and your online storefront seems to be the only way to get closer with potential Internet buyers. Professional brand and image is absolutely necessary to attract your future customers. Moreover, another thing worth noticing is that as a store owner you are completely responsible for safety of clients' private data (name, physical address, personal preferences) as well as credit card numbers. Most visitors think twice before they provide the credit card data and have to be sure they're dealing with a trustworthy company.
Novices making the first steps in
e-commerce are aimed at the way to decrease the initial costs to
minimum. Last thing the newcomers are looking forward to is spending
thousands of dollars to hire a team of professional developers and make
an automated shopping cart system from the ground up. It's not the one
and only problem for any kind of businesses, of course; but the point
we're making is that any well-thought project requires minimizing the
initial funds and maximizing the profit.
There's a great number
of turn-key or distributed e-commerce solutions with different features
ranging widely in design, security, support quality and price as well.
Most web hosting services specializing in e-commerce offer their own
shopping cart packages, and most of the Web development companies
will also gladly make a totally customized product based exactly on your
requirements and specifications. All you need to do in this case is to pay
your bills and everything else will be done for you with total
responsibility (including source code, security and time limits) held
by the developers. Still, it's hard to expect that such service will be
affordable for small companies or for those who
haven't yet got profitable offline business to gain revenue from.
Luckily,
the demand for affordable, stable and customizable shopping cart
software can be satisfied. There's a number of popular open-source
e-commerce products with a simple, user-friendly setup, administration
and configuration. The question is, which one should you decide on?
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Revision date: 14 Dec 2005
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