Web Shopping Carts

What is a shopping cart?

In web development, when we talk about 'Shopping carts', don't just mean the shopping cart page that the user can use to inspect their purchase list: we mean entire systems allow users to search a database of products, see product information, and for the site to keep a list of the product the user wants to buy. (You might prefer to call it a shopping basket or trolley).

Do you need a shopping cart?

Shopping cart systems are a half of the eCommerce solution: they allow users to choose from your products. Payments are handled by different technology: you can attach any payment system to a web shopping cart.

If you want users to buy online from your web site, you probably need a shopping cart. We can provide a top quality shopping cart solution using Agora, or another system if you have a specific requirement to do so.

Web Shopping Cart Summary

• Shopping carts are complete systems for choosing a 'basket' of goods from a vendor online.
• Shopping carts provide a friendly and familiar interface to users when shopping online.
• Shopping carts are a means of putting an order together in a reliable and predictable way.
• Shopping carts are not online payment systems, but they be integrated with one.
• There are many different shopping cart systems, we recommend Agora because of its security and great range of features.
• Once you have your products in a database, you, or the user can search and query them to find the ones the want.
• The information you put in the database is all the user has to base their choices on
• Pictures of products can be very useful in helping the user make a choice and in selling the product, but searches can't be done on images, so you need good text too.

Database Updates

If you have a shopping cart, you need a database to put your products in. When you want to add or change products, or their availability you need to update your database. Depending on your type of business, this could be a frequent task, or it might be very rare. We can deliver the right solution so that your database updates are as little bother as possible.

• You need to keep your database up to date.
• If you don't change it much that's no problem, we can do it for you.
• If you make frequent changes then you need a way to manage your own database remotely.
• You can do this with specialised secure pages in the web site.
• You can also do it with a 'content management system' or CMS
• A CMS is really much more than just a tool to update a db, so you really don't need one if the only data you change frequently is in your product database.