Merchant Shopping Cart

The working of a Merchant Shopping Cart is very similar to that of a regular shopping cart at a walk-in store. You put all the items you want in the cart as you walk around the store for checking out later. Click Add To Shopping Cart or Buy Now link buttons every time you want to add an item to the cart. There’s no need to be afraid to use shopping carts as you can always put back items from your cart later. Once you are ready for check out, you’ll get a list of products in your cart with the provision to delete any of them that you have second thoughts about. If you close the shopping cart window without completing the check out process, no order will be processed.

Merchant Shopping Cart can be of several different types, each with its set of advantages and disadvantages.

CGI Shopping Cart: The biggest plus of this particular Merchant Shopping Cart, is the support by all the major browsers. On the flipside, however, is the difficulty in set-up and maintenance, slowness and excessive bandwidth and system resources leading to wastage.

Cookie Shopping Cart: A Merchant Shopping Cart that’s easy to both, set up and maintain. Faster than traditional CGI shopping cart, it also uses less bandwidth and system resources. The drawback lies in the fact that browsers that don’t support cookies don’t support them. In cases where users turn off cookies in their browser, they become ineffective.

Java Shopping Cart: A Merchant Shopping Cart that offers rich content with visually appealing interface (not limited by HTML). The limitations are difficulty in customizing and slowness since you have to build your store inside the applet.

JavaScript Shopping Cart: Fast, easy set-up and maintenance, simple customizing, this Merchant Shopping Cart also saves on bandwidth and system resources. However browsers that enable cookies and JavaScript can only support them. It is also difficult to set up large shopping carts using this option