What is a Shopping Cart?
A software program that is integrated with the payment gateway of a merchant’s website for the purpose of transmitting data from online credit card transactions to the credit card acquirer. The transaction amount is then authorized by the bank, and the transaction is settled just as when transaction data is entered into a Virtual Terminal.
A shopping cart is what you use at a grocery store to hold the items you wish to buy. Similarly, on the internet, a shopping cart is a feature of an e-commerce web site which allows you to hold the items you wish to purchase. With a shopping cart, you can add and remove items from the shopping cart. After shopping you proceed to the checkout where you pay for the items you wish to purchase.
On a Web site that sells products or services online, the shopping cart is a common metaphor (from the original grocery store shopping cart) for the catalog or other pages where a user reads and makes selections. Typically, the user checks off any products or services that are being ordered and then, when finished ordering, “Checks Out” by proceeding to a page where the various information such as billing and shipping information is collected and the order is placed and confirmed. The programming that provides a Web site with the ability to build a catalog, build its associated database and integrate pages into the Web site that provide users the ability to shop is known as shopping cart software. A primary consideration when choosing shopping cart software is whether it will continue to serve a Web site’s needs as its catalog and volume of orders grow. The shopping cart software we offer (Miva Merchant and osCommerce) supports an unlimited number of products.
