E-Commerce Shopping Cart Considerations

There are many different types of shopping carts available. The best one depends on your needs which may be different than someone else. We have listed some questions that you may wish to consider in determining which e-commerce shopping cart to choose.

Is the shopping cart customizable to your business?
Our cart is customizable. We use Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP). ASP is a scripting language that is broadly supported by millions of programmers and web designers. There are many support web sites, books and of course information from Microsoft. Some popular carts like Miva use a proprietary scripting language and database. It is harder to find support for this and the database is not easily scalable. Perl is also popular and excellent for many purposes but we find it is more difficult to customize. Perl normally uses a flat text file database which is less powerful and flexible that a relational database. We would recommend either ASP, PHP or JSP as a scripting language.

When my business grows can the shopping cart handle it?
Our carts can easily scale with no re-learning. The Standard shopping cart can easily upgrade to the Access database shopping cart and the Access database can be upgraded to a Microsoft SQL or MySQL database.

How powerful and flexible is the database?
Microsoft Access is a very powerful easy to use database. Database searching and updating are fast. Most companies already have Access since it part of the Microsoft Office suite. We use OLEDB connections (faster than ODBC) and use other database optimizations. Higher traffic sites can use Microsoft SQL.

How easy is it to track sales orders?
We designed both the Standard and Database shopping carts so all sales orders are stored separately from the inventory database. This way the sales order database can be downloaded and achieved on your local computer for longer history and better analysis. The sales database also tracks products placed in the shopping cart but not ordered. This helps you analyze important data from abandoned shopping carts that may lead to a significant increase in business. The cart also tracks inventory history for each product their sold by month for the past 12 months.

How easy will it integrate to my internal accounting system?
Since all sales are placed in a downloadable database the data can be easily configured and exported to a format that can be imported into your accounting system. 

How easy is it to update my database inventory items?
Our database has flexible importing of inventory items. You can import Access, dBase and Excel.  You can easily update multiple products and selected fields at one time. For an ongoing store this will save you significant time and labor cost. Since we use ASP you can also create your own custom scripts to update or modify your database.

Cost Savings?
We designed our e-commerce shopping cart for efficient time and cost saving capabilities. Compared with other carts you may save several hours or more per month in maintaining your online store. This labor cost savings per month is a significant importance that should be considered when compared with other solutions.