Tony Sarno20 February 2007, 8:46 PM
In the end, we went with a package from NetMerchant, but we had to study the shopping cart market in some detail.
The simplest way to differentiate between the main shopping cart options is how they generate the product catalogue pages and do the payment transactions, as this tends to relate directly to their sophistication and cost. The following options are the most common, in order of simplest to most complex.
Option 1: Simple product pages on your website.
These aren’t strictly carts, but simple pages on the merchant’s own website generated by the merchant with any html-editing software. Descriptions of products and prices are added manually, as well as a “Buy Now” button, which activates a script that transfers the customer to a third party credit cart payment provider like PayPal. If you’re selling just a couple of products this is easily the most hassle-free way of doing e-commerce. In essence, all you really need is an account with PayPal. The downside is that you have to stitch everything together yourself, making it impossible to manage once you have more than a few products.
Payment System Options:
• “Buy Now” buttons linked to third party credit card payment providers.
Option 2: Shopping cart hosted on the same server as your website or hosted by the cart provider.
If you’re selling more than a few products, you need a tool that automatically generates your product and category pages. This is where shopping cart software comes into its own.
Carts can be purchased off-the-shelf for a once-off fee and will generate product catalogues to be hosted on your web site. After purchasing the cart, most shopping cart owners then pay the shopping cart provider an ongoing monthly fee to have the cart hooked into a payment system.
There are literally hundreds of shopping carts available on the Net. There's even open source carts available at no cost, although they require the merchant to have serious coding expertise to set them up and to link them to payment systems.
In essence, all carts will keep track of what customers select, then take them to a checkout page. From there, the payment system takes over. Most shopping carts can be hooked up to any number of payment system options.
Payment system options
- Checkout page links out to third party credit card payment provider.
- Checkout page links out to payments server hosted by shopping cart provider (which in turns links to payment gateway and credit cart network). Ezimerchant shopping carts are an example of this. Once customers have filled the cart, they are linked out to a secure page on the Ezimerchant site, which processes the payment. There is a monthly fee for the hosted payment services in addition to the once-off payment for the cart software. Separately, you will need to set up an internet merchant bank account with your bank in order to receive credit card payments.
- Checkout page links directly to a payment gateway. This is the most complex solution, which will need the merchant to deal directly with a payment gateway and to link to it from the merchant's site (which will require programming skills). The payment gateway is the middleman that links the store to the credit card networks. The merchant will needs to purchase an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate to establish secure connections between the cart and the shoppers’ computers.
Option 3: Fully hosted e-commerce shopfront
The fully hosted solution is recommended when a merchant wants to focus on running the core business instead of also running an IT infrastructure to support an e-commerce store.
The entire shopping cart, checkout and payment system are fully integrated and hosted by a third party application service provider. In this scenario, the cart package can be your entire shopfront, not just the product pages. Or it can be integrated to an existing site and customised to carry the existing branding and look and feel.
For merchants who are selling a large range of products with complex business rules, a shopping cart that's fully hosted by a third party is probably the only realistic option unless they are prepared to hire programmers and maintain the sophisticated cart technology and transactional systems required.
NetMerchant provides an example of this. Its fully-hosted cart can be integrated into the merchant’s website (i.e, subaru.com.au) or it can be a site by itself (www.piano.com.au). Since e-commerce providers like NetMerchant have their own teams of programmers, they're able to create shopping carts tailored to closely suit the business rules of their merchants.
We built Geek Gear using NetMerchant's hosted shopfront. There's a shopping cart at its core, but comes with pre-built links to a payment gateway and NetMerchant's consulting expertise.
Option 4: Fully hosted ecommerce solutions with deep links to inventory and ordering systems.
This is an option for mid-size to large businesses willing to outsource not just the e-commerce functions but most of their major business applications. The advantage is that the cart, order management, realtime inventory and customer management are completely integrated, since they are hosted in the one database by the one provider. NetSuite is an example of a fully-hosted e-commerce solution integrated with other business processes.
Option 5: Enterprise e-commerce
Large enterprises create their own e-commerce infrastructures. This approach requires multi-million dollar investments and is beyond the scope of this series.
NEXT: How a shopping cart works