Small business is not necessarily simple
If a business is small, it does not translate into simple business. For example a business, which sells t-shirts for few dollars apiece with different sizes and colors and different designs or patters for each size and color, is not very simple. Keeping track of its inventory is a big job when done manually. And small sales volume keeps a business small. But a hosted shopping cart service may still call it simple.
Simple eCommerce is not always simple
Simple businesses don’t have plethora of items for sale or classes of items but rather few items or services. Also some simple shopping cart software has limits to number of items that they can manage. Some items are easily manageable on the Internet like eBooks, computer games etc. Such sales might be totally automated, because there are no shipments or few small shipments. Business is very simple. But eCommerce shopping cart is not the simplest.
Simple eCommerce applications
Simple eCommerce shopping carts do only few simple things like sell with or without a database and usually include some way to take payments from customers. Several methods are used like PayPal, other payment processing services, which are simple, and slightly more complicated methods like merchant accounts with payment gateways, which process customer credit cards to sellers. An eCommerce application connects to a payment gateway, which is a different application from a shopping cart. Shopping carts and payment gateways are common eCommerce applications. But some simple shopping carts take credit card information and leave it to be dealt manually like in a shop’s credit card machines resulting into a very simple eCommerce application, but more manual labor. When sale and payments are taken care of electronically, it leaves packing and shipping of sold items to be done manually, which could also be helped by providing links to shippers like UPS, FedEx etc. in a less simple application.
Simple shopping cart software
It is not very easy to describe a simple shopping cart, since many shopping carts provide standard features, and because there are so many shopping cart applications to choose from. Open source software distributes some for free under General Public License (GPL). There are also shopping carts from open source content management systems (CMS). Some of them are not free, while CMS itself is free. The benefit of CMS is that there are also templates and extensions for more flexibility in outlook and functions. There are also other good functional shopping carts within reasonable costs from proprietary sources. What really matters is that a shopping cart fits to business purposes, provides right way to deal with payments and maybe provides some customer service for example information on products.
- Written by:
- JVA da Hut
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