Definition: In online marketing, a shopping cart is a piece of e-commerce software on a web server that allows visitors to an Internet site to select items for eventual purchase.
In ecommerce, a shopping cart is certainly like the metal shopping cart you imagined you were pushing around Walmart, but it is also the shelves, the building, the discount sign, the cash register, and in many cases the credit card machine communicating with your bank. Effectively, an ecommerce shopping cart is an online store.
The ecommerce shopping cart is a software package that accepts customer payment and shipping information and facilitates the distribution of that information to merchants, payment processors, or others.
At the surface, an ecommerce shopping cart is really something that every beginning online merchant intuitively recognizes. For example, almost no one would consider opening an online store without having made a few purchases online themselves.
The common form of “shopping cart” describes a sort of specialized content management system that (1) stores product data; (2) provides an administration portal for catalog, order, and customer management; (3) renders product data, product categories, and website information for display to site visitors; (4) serves as the hub for on-site merchandising and cross selling, and (5) passes transactional data to a payment gateway or begins order processing itself.
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