Shopping Cart Software

The main purpose of shopping cart software is to facilitate the taking of payments online in exchange for goods and/or services. They come in many variations from extremely simple to pretty complex, however they can typically be placed in one of two categories.

Shopping Cart Software categories

The first shopping cart software category merely provides a button or link for a prospective customer to click to be taken to a payment page. They may also include the ability to add multiple items to a cart, allowing your customer to pay for many items at one time. PayPal “Buy Now” and “Add to Cart” buttons are a perfect example of this. Also included in this category are 1ShoppingCart, Google Checkout, and cart66. (Almost all payment provider carts fall into this category). Many, such as 1ShoppingCart, will allow for multiple payment processing options (e.g. PayPal and Authorize.net) to be made available to your customer. When using this type of cart, you will have to create individual pages for all of your products and manually add the link or button code. For this reason, these types of carts can be easily integrated into a WordPress website. Some, such as cart66, are actually WordPress plugins.

The second category will provide the capabilities of the first category as well as functionality to organize your store. They provide the ability to categorize your products in different departments and automatically generate web pages with all products from the department displayed, etc. You simply go into your shopping cart admin area, add the products and their details (price, description, image, etc.), and the cart takes care of dynamically generating pages to display your items. Integration with WordPress is difficult with most of these, as the software is designed to be a complete solution requiring no other components to make a shopping website. Some examples of this type of shopping cart include Shopify, osCommerce, Magento. There are some WordPress plugins in this category: WP e-Commerce,  YAK (Yet Another Kart), WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin, and Shopp.

Which type do you need?

That depends. What are you selling? If you are selling just a few products, one of the options from the first category will be more than adequate. However, if you are offering many different items on your website, an offering from category two is most likely what you want.