E Shopping Cart

When you are deciding which e shopping cart to use for your online business, you will no doubt have to consider the various ways shopping carts recognize each of your customers and whether or not you want your program to use cookies for this process. Understanding what a cookie is and how it works with an e shopping cart is an important part of making your decision.

What is a cookie?
When you visit certain e shopping cart websites, that site places what is known as a cookie into your computer’s memory. This cookie is a text-only string, which generally contains a unique ID for each of the website’s visitors. Some of these files are temporary and exist only in a computer’s memory while a user is at a particular site. However, many of these files are saved on the visitor’s hard drive so they can be referenced the next time a person visits the site that generated the cookie.

Cookies are pretty easy to recognize on your hard drive. They are generally saved in a folder named Cookies, which is located in the Windows folder on you hard drive. If you’re operating system is set up for multiple users, a user’s Cookies folder will be located in the Documents and Settings folder for that particular user. Once you get to the correct folder, you will see that a cookie file has the name of the website domain in it and has a .txt designation. An example cookie name would be user@store.yahoo.

How is a cookie used?
E shopping cart websites use cookies to recognize a particular visitor. Once the user is recognized, the website can then interact specific to that user. For example, when you go to certain e shopping cart websites where you have a login ID you may notice that the login field is automatically populated with your ID when you open the site. This is because the site found its cookie, recognized you as a specific user, and filled out the login field with your information.

By using cookies, a site can not only populate certain fields but it can also gear certain parts of the website to the specific visitor. An example of this is an online store e shopping cart that recognizes a user and suggests merchandise similar to what the user has purchased in the past. This tailoring of a website can attract a visitor to be a repeat customer by the personal touch it adds to the shopping experience.

How much business will I lose if I require a person accepts cookies?
That’s a hard question to answer. Some surveys such as one conducted by SNET DSL show that up to a third of internet users do not trust cookies. It is probably safe to say, however, that if these users are so untrusting of information passing over the web then chances are they don’t purchase much if anything on the internet anyway. Most people who do a lot of online shopping have come to accept cookies as a necessary and often useful part of the shopping experience.