Article submitted by www.securenetshop.com
For any business to conduct online sales it requires ecommerce shopping cart software. This is basically the software that keeps track of all the “buy” actions that a customer makes on a website. At the end of all the browsing, it shows the customer all the items they have asked for and looks for final confirmation. It functions right up to the point where credit card and personal details are sent over to the merchant services provider. Without this tracking software, online purchases would be a very cumbersome affair indeed.
Online shopping cart software comes in three basic flavors.
- Developed in-house
- Outsourced
- Off the shelf
The first option is the best one, if you have the time and resources to allocate to it. It takes a little longer to get up and running, but you have total control over the whole shopping cart and maximum confidentiality is ensured. With the second one there is a little less confidentiality, but your expenditure may be less and you will get the product fairly fast. The third one is the quickest to get and implement and is also possibly the cheapest. But, you will not know if the developer has left a backdoor in it. This represents security issues and problems later on down the line. The bottom line is that for your website shopping cart is a necessity. But since security is a troublesome issue, you should take a lot of time in deciding how you are going to implement it.