Three Types of Ecommerce Shopping Cart Software

A Home Business Article Contributed by Elizabeth Fox-Wise

Three Types of Ecommerce Shopping Cart Software

Most ecommerce sites will need to have shopping cart software. At its most basic level, this is the software that will allow your customers to put their selected merchandise somewhere while they look around to see what else they want to purchase! Imagine having a site without a shopping cart ecommerce software. Each customer would only be able to purchase one item at a time, because every time they picked up an item they would loose the one they last had! This could never be good for sales.

There are basically three types of ecommerce shopping cart software. Although the basics of each of them are the same - to function as a virtual shopping cart for your customers, each one has it's own distinct point. Which one is best for you depends on the nature of your ecommerce business and software needs.

Shopping Carts with Data Bases are One Ecommerce Software Choice

These are ecommerce software shopping cart packages that work with relational databases. A relational database stores all of the data collected inside tables. All operations on data are done on the tables themselves or produces another tables as the end result. You will never see data presented in anyway other than tables.

The main advantage of choosing is type of ecommerce shopping cart software is it will give you the most control over uploading specific parts of your products database, and downloading purchase details from the website. This software will also allow you to query your database of product inventory as means of monitoring inventory control.

Ecommerce Shopping Cart Software Without Relational Database

All Shopping Cart software programs should come with some means of recording, saving and retrieving information collected from your customers at your ecommerce site. Some of them , however, do this without the use of a relational database.

An ecommerce shopping cart software without a relational database is typically much less expensive to purchase and much easier to set up. Making this a really attractive option for small and start up ecommerce business.

However, the downside to this type of ecommerce software is that the information collected by your website, the data, is not as easy to retrieve for analysis. This can be a big limitation if you want to analyse the date from your site to help with the future marketing of your ecommerce business.

Ecommerce Shopping Cart Software with Integrated Accounting Package

The third option is to purchase an ecommerce shopping cart software that comes with integrated accounting software.

Irregardless of which shopping cart software package you choose, it is typically always possible to export data from your shopping cart management files to your accounting software program. However, the process of getting the two softwares to work well together can be a daunting task. This process is made much easier if you choose an ecommerce shopping cart software package that already comes with an integrated accounting program. In this case you know the two pieces of software are compatible and the transfer of data should be easier.