The shopping cart is analogous to the ‘front-end’ of ecommerce – it displays the products on your website and collects information like the type and number of products in the cart. After your customers are done shopping, they checkout and are taken to the payment processor, where they enter their credit card details. The price will then be charged against their credit cards and credited to your bank account.

Essentially, the main functions of a shopping cart include:

• Calculating the total purchase price for your customers.
• Calculating the taxes and shipping costs.
• Enabling you to manage your online store – to add new products or delete old products, and edit information like product prices and inventory.
• Giving you access to customers’ personal information like name and address, so that you can fulfill your orders.

User-friendliness

One of the main purposes of a shopping cart is to give your customer an easy and seamless buying experience. When selecting a shopping cart, you need to ensure that it’s very user-friendly – customers can browse through your product catalog easily and be able to check out quickly and effortlessly.

Consider this opposite scenario: A frustrated shopper is trying hard to find your product and pricing information, but because of the complexity of your shopping cart, the shopper is much more inclined to leave your site for a store that’s more user-friendly.

Thus, ensure that the shopping cart you use on your site provides easy navigation, and also that information like product features and prices are easily accessible.

Customizing Your Shopping Cart

Of course, the appearance of your shopping cart must be congruent with the overall look and feel of your site. This means that your background color, logo and navigation bars appear consistent with the rest of your site.

To customize the look of your shopping cart, some programming knowledge may be required. Shopping carts like Oscommerce use PHP, so you may need a background in PHP programming before you can tweak the coding of the shopping cart.

Alternatively, the easy way out is to purchase shopping cart templates that allow you to modify the logo and graphics. All you need to do after that is to match the site structure and appearance of your homepage with that of your shopping cart template.

Recommendation – Oscommerce

Unless your business has very complicated needs, there is no need to build and customize your own shopping cart software. OsCommerce (http://www.oscommerce.com) is a free, open source shopping cart software that can cater to the needs of most online businesses. It’s so user-friendly and popular that most web designing companies use it as the shopping cart platform for their customers.

The features it offers are excellent:

• It supports unlimited products and categories.
• User administration area to add/edit/remove products and categories.
• Advanced front-end customer functionality, like order history and search features.
• Compatible with most payment processors like 2CheckOut.
• Ability to calculate shipping and tax costs.

With OsCommerce, the additional work needed include:

• Integration with MySQL database to store customers’ information.
• Integration with the payment processor, like Paypal or 2CheckOut.
• Integration with the design and layout of your website.
• Data entry of the all the product names, pictures, prices, quantities, etc.

Conclusion

Remember that your shopping cart provides the storefront that displays your entire product catalog. The user-friendliness and functionality of your shopping cart is critical for the success of your online business. So make sure that the shopping cart you choose represents your business well.