A shopping cart is essential to your ecommerce business. A good shopping cart should:

• have a simple checkout process
• not distract the customer from completing their purchase
• have a minimal number of steps
• have an easy way to adjust purchases items and quantities
• integrate seamlessly with payment processing
• automatically send emails to the customer upon completion of the purchase
• provide statistical information about cart usage

Some shopping cart systems also:

• maintain inventory
• have customer service options included
• offer email systems to your customer list
• work as POS systems and phone order systems

Security should be a major consideration in deciding on a shopping cart system. The public is very aware of the connection between identity theft and online shopping. Secure web sites use something called an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) to encrypt information as it is passed back and forth from a web site to a customer's computer. Many shopping carts systems provide an SSL certificate with the setup of their cart.