What are Shopping Carts? Ecommerce shopping carts are explained as a virtual counterpart to the shopping cart you find at a grocery store. But what are shopping carts? What do shopping carts do? What are the best shopping carts? This article explains.

The Basics of Shopping Carts

If you have a retail store of a certain type, your customers might collect their merchandise in a shopping cart, which has the following attributes:

• It might have been chosen to color coordinate with the store design and sized to fit the store layout, but other than that has no connection with how the store operates. In fact, patrons could shop without ever using a shopping cart, if they wished to.

• If they do use a shopping cart, as they stroll through the store pushing the cart, customers can put merchandise in, take it out, choose an alternative color or style, or decide to purchase more than one.

• When the customer chooses to approach a cashier for checkout, the assumption is that they intend to purchase everything in the cart at that point. The amounts are added up, any tax or deposits added and any coupons, gift certificates, or sale amounts subtracted, and the customer is presented with the total cost.

• The customer then proffers payment that—if it is a credit or debit card—may be processed using a POS (point of sale) terminal.

• When the payment is accepted, the merchandise is prepared for leaving the store and transferred to the customer’s ownership.

How is an ecommerce shopping cart different? Many ways:

• The ecommerce shopping cart software may be the entire foundation of the online store, not only "holding" the customers chosen products and services, but providing the layout and color and arrangement of the merchandise. There is no option to shop without a cart: the cart is how one shops. Prior to shopping—and if not prior, at some point before checkout—customers will almost inevitably have to create a user account.

• The customer only has to click a button saying "add to cart" to select merchandise for purchase: there is no equivalent of "pushing the cart," which continues to exist as long as the customer has an open session at your store. They can select items to add, and they can also either "review" or "edit" their cart at any point prior to going to the checkout, changing items; item properties, such as color; and number of each selected item.

• Check-out is similar overall. Items sold online are prepared for shipping, rather than packed for the customer to take with, of course, and shipping and handling are added and the items, which are not present at the transaction, are ordered up. Another difference is how payments are processed, and this may happen using a merchant account or a service like PayPal or Google Checkout to put through a credit or debit card payment or a deduction from the customer’s PayPal or bank account, for example.

• When the payment is accepted, the merchandise is prepared for shipping to the customer at the address designated in the checkout process. A confirming email is usually automatically generated and sent to the customer. A following email is often sent to confirm shipping information and provide the customer with a tracking number.

Shopping carts for online business may be designed to be built up into a whole ecommerce operation, including catalog pages and more. This is true of the open source shopping carts AgoraCart and Zen Cart, the fine-tuning of which requires coding ability. Simpler shopping carts, which simply provide add-on checkout ability to a site built with another tool are often available through webhosts. It may require minimal configuration to work for standard checkout operations. Special adaptations may be available in shopping carts to allow for downloads and other non-standard types of delivery of items.

Related Article: Top Payment Gateways >>