How Does Shopping Cart Software Work?

COPYRIGHT 2004 Wilson Internet Services

Just what is a shopping cart? It's a term that has come to mean either

1. An online ordering system (separate from your regular website). Usually these supply HTML code for "order buttons" that you can paste into pages on your regular website. Your customer looks through your website to pick out products, but when she clicks on the order button, she is transported to the ordering system (usually hosted on an entirely different website) to complete the transaction.

2. A store-building system, on the other hand, handles your webpages as well as orders on the same site.

If you're selling only a few products, just an online ordering system will do fine. But when you try to display and sell 50 or 100 or 1,000 or 100,000 different products, you'll need store-building, catalog-managing system, that produces and manages the product pages for each of your products.

The term "shopping cart" is inadequate, of course, to describe all the functions of the either variety of modern e-commerce systems. "Storefront software" might be a better term. But, like it or not, the term "shopping cart" has stuck, so that's the term I'll be using throughout this book -- "cart" for short -- as a generic term to refer to both types of systems. To distinguish between the two I'll refer to an "online ordering system" or a "store-building system."

In this chapter I'll describe the features typically included in all carts -- an ordering system. In the next, I'll discuss the additional features included in store-building systems. As you read these chapters, I hope it will help you determine the features you need and decide which features aren't important for your needs.

There is no one magic cart that fits all needs, but probably dozens that will meet your particular needs.

The Basic Functions

Sally Shopper doesn't really care about the inner workings of your store, she's only looking for convenience, security, and efficient handling of the her order. Let's look at shopping first from her viewpoint.

Shopping Cart

You want Sally Shopper feeling free to browse without being locked into purchasing decisions until later. Online stores quickly developed the metaphor of a shopping basket or shopping cart ("trolley" in Britain) into which customers place selections. Business-to-business (B2B) sites such as W.W. Grainger (www.grainger.com) use the term "order form," more suited to a business purchasing model.

This product selection feature needs to allow Sally Shopper to add or remove products from her cart and to indicate quantity. Nearly all carts these days allow here to indicate two or three options for each product, such as an extra large (size) green (color) flannel shirt. Imagine selecting shoes (size, width, color) or window blinds (color, height, width). A few carts even allow sales of fractions of a unit, such as when buying cloth or lumber.

An increasing number of store-building systems shows the items in the cart and a running total on each page. This helps customers remember where they are in the ordering process.

BM__Toc61489036Tax Calculations

All ordering systems keep a running total of the items Sally has put in her shopping cart. Once Sally enters her physical address, the program can calculate taxes.

When you only need to calculate taxes for shoppers in the merchant's state or city, a simple look-up table by tax jurisdiction indicates the sales tax percentage to add. All carts do this adequately. The better carts allow tax calculation by ZIP code, which enable you to handle collections from states (such as New York) that require in-state merchants to collect taxes according to the rate in each county or other jurisdictions.

But what happens when you have physical store locations in 15 states? More sophisticated software now allows for plug-ins such as TaxWare's Sales/Use Tax System (www.taxware.com) or CertiTax (www.esalestax.com/products.htm) which calculate in real time exact taxes for the US and Canada.