Shopping Cart

A shopping cart is a software application that typically runs on the computer where your Web site is located (the Web server), and allows your customers to do things such as searching for a product in your store catalog, adding a selected product to a basket, and placing an order for it.

The shopping cart "integrates" with the rest of your Web site. In other words, there are typically links on your Web pages that customers can click on, and which allow them to perform some of the functions described above. For example, many ecommerce Web sites have a "search" link appearing on every Web page, as part of the navigation area. The link points to a feature (i.e. the search feature) provided by the shopping cart.

Shopping carts are written in a variety of different programming languages. Some of them provide full access to the "source code", thus allowing experienced programmers to make modifications to the system features, some others don't. Some shopping carts run on Windows Web servers, some on Unix, others on both. In most cases, you can place the shopping cart on your Web server simply by transferring its files there using any FTP software, where FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol.