Firstly lets address the question of what a shopping cart is. Basically an ecommerce-shopping cart is a series of scripts that keep track of items a visitor picks to buy from your site until they proceed to the "checkout”. A popular misconception is that online shopping carts handle the whole financial transaction, but they only really act as a front end which passes sensitive information like the credit card number via a secure connection to a payment gateway.

The payment gateway service then channels the requests and transfers it throughout relevant financial networks and sends back confirmation or denial back to the ecommerce platform.

There are a number of points that one should consider before selecting a shopping cart:

• The e-commerce shopping cart should be compatible with the payment method. There are dozens of different payment gateways, which plug into various shopping cart packages, so one needs to make sure if the shopping cart that has been selected is compatible with the right payment method.
• One should check out what kinds of payments are supported by the ecommerce shopping cart. In today’s virtual world credit cards have become the most widely accepted method of payment. So one needs to make sure that the shopping cart solution supports credit card payments. It is also essential that the shopping cart, which is selected, accepts payment in multi-currencies, so as to enable the site to serve customers around the globe. The shopping cart must also be able to offer various payment options apart from payment using credit cards to the client like payment by cheque or payment on delivery.
• The shopping cart should also be compatible with the hosting service. The shopping carts are coded in various coding formats like Perl, Asp etc so one must make sure that the cart that one selects is compatible with the hosting service.
• Security is the most essential feature for any ecommerce shopping cart software. A secure shopping cart normally will have a firewall, which safeguards it against any intruders. Apart from this the shopping cart should also have an excellent connectivity. Excellent connectivity ensures that the transactions carried out are executed efficiently and smoothly.
• A good shopping cart application will have excellent support for backing up files and allowing for export into a variety of formats. This will take care of disaster management.
• Finally and most importantly one should check out if the shopping cart fits ones budget.

One of the best Ecommerce shopping carts around on the web today is GoECart. GoECart is a robust, reliable and secure ecommerce shopping cart software with a complete end-to-end functionality. Developing and managing an online web store, using GoECart, is as easy as point, click and fill in the blanks.

Still having questions on basics of Ecommerce? Read our ecommerce faqs to learn more!