Do you want to sell your products online? Are you not really sure where to start? It is more than likely that youll need to get yourself some shopping cart software, or develop your own. This software is the backbone of any online store. It allows you to display your products online and let potential customers make purchases from you.
Most shopping cart solutions comprise of 4 parts; the actually shopping cart, a product catalogue, the checkout process and an administration panel of some form.
The Product Catalogue is, as you would expect, the part of the store that displays your products. This can range from a single hand coded HTML page displaying a few products up to a massive multi-category store containing thousands of products. Store with a large number of products normally use a dynamic solution driven by a database, this allow information about the products to be changed with simple database updates rather than making changes to every page. These are commonly written in web scripting languages such as PHP or Active Server Pages.
Without the shopping cart component of your store your customers will not be able to make a purchase and hand over the...