Shopping cart is an integral part of e-commerce business web sites. Even if you are just selling your book, if you want to let the visitors buy two or more different items or multiple amount of the same item, shopping cart can be really helpful.

Each cart has its own features but basically they work the same. The most basic functions of a shopping cart software or script include:

1. Keep a catalog of your products (or services).
2. Keep running cart for the customer.
3. Capture or confirm payment details.
4. Notifying you about product sales.

Those are just the basics. With those basic features, shopping cart developers develop solutions that are different from one another.

Criteria for Choosing Shopping Cart Solutions

When choosing a shopping cart solution for your web site, there are several solutions that you want to know about. This can help you save time and money. If you buy without assessing your needs, you may find that one shopping cart script lacks of a feature that you absolutely want to have.

If the company won’t be able to provide the feature in a timely manner, it means that you waste the time and money re-implementing the new custom shopping cart from scratch.

1. User experience / ease of use / usability. The ability of your site to provide the best user experience throughout the shopping process is utmost important. While this maybe related to the design of your site, at least the layout and checkout process may impact sales.
2. Features. What features do you want to have in the cart. If you plan to offer discount coupons every so often for existing customers, is it possible to do so within the shopping cart?
3. Price. Price is always an issue for small business owners or solopreneurs. Don’t forget to take all the add-ons that you require into account.
4. Setup. How hard is it to setup and integrate the shopping cart to your existing site? How could you migrate from another solution to this one?
5. Administration. You want an intuitive administration interface that allows you to add products, customers, view reports, etc.
6. Level of customization. Could you customize the layout to match your site? How can you integrate different functions of the shopping cart to your site?
7. Speed. The speed between the customers and your site depends on a lot of factors, but at least the shopping cart software should run fast without much overhead on your server.
8. Stability of the system. Reputable shopping cart vendors hire top-notch developers to create their shopping cart system. If the software crashes for some reason, they should be able to fix it quickly. Software that is too unpredictable can cost a lot of money (for fixing it and losing sales revenue).
9. Security. How about the security of the shopping cart? Although conceptually no script is 100 percent secure, you don’t want shopping cart that is easily breakable by the “hackers.” Having good track records for security is important for the availability of your site and e-store.
10. Expandability. Can you add additional features that is not available in standard package? For example, if you give membership access to your customers, could you integrate that with existing forum software?
11. Scalability. Your cart should be able to handle the amount of products and combination of them for your store and hopefully cope with your growth at least a few years from now.
12. Company’s customer support. Who is going to solve your problem when problems appear? Will they provide quick fix to security problems as soon as humanly possible?

Conclusion

Choosing the right shopping cart is very important. You want to avoid the headache later when your shopping cart doesn’t actually have the feature you want. Perhaps it is too unstable to be usable for your customers (it crashes every 10 minutes that you have to restart your server software), etc. By carefully going through the criteria above. You can rest assured that when you’ve implemented the shopping cart to your site, it will work like you want.