Affordable Shopping Cart

Basically, the shopping cart works by keeping track of what your customers order until they are ready to complete the order or "check out." At that point, the cart collects buyer’s name, billing address, phone and collects their credit card information (unless you are doing real-time credit card authorization, then the cart "hands the customers off" to a form merchant account site and waits to hear back), then generates a receipt for the customers and sends you information to fulfill the order.

Generally an Affordable Shopping Cart having these features:
(i) If you are doing real-time credit card processing, your Affordable Shopping Cart software needs to be able to tie up with merchant account software. You might think there is a standard, but boy, would you be wrong. For that reason, you should really decide on both in tandem to ensure compatibility.

(ii) Your Affordable Shopping Cart software can be added automatically to each shipping & handling calculation and can be able to automatic shipping confirmation by e-mail to your customer receives e-mail when product is shipped.

(iii) Some hosting companies include Affordable Shopping Cart software as part of your hosting package. This can be good because then you don't have to lay out any cash or do any significant set-up. You basically just embed some information within the HTML of the page describing the product on your site, define a few variables, and you are done. And a lot of times the hosting company has already found merchant account providers their software works with.

(iv) Affordable Shopping Cart software should be having internet standard for website security and e-commerce (Supports any SSL Certificate), Encryption of stored credit cards, Secured, password protected administration area.

(v) If you want to be able to configure what your customers seen while checking out and the information they get in the receipt after they've checked out. So make sure you have a lot of power to change elements of the shopping cart interface.

(vi) Customer can login to their account by providing their email address and password.

(vii) Customer can update their billing / shipping addresses, change their password.

(viii) Customer can view all orders placed, view order status, and modify orders that have not shipped yet.

(ix) Customer can manage additional features such as "Reviews" they wrote, or "Affiliate Statistics" if they are an affiliate.

(x) Complete documentation within the administration area, plus an additional manual, helpful tutorials & support knowledge base.