E-COMMERCE SOFTWARE

It may pay to look around for shopping cart software

Danny Speight

If you have or are planning a shop on the Internet, you've probably thought about shopping cart software. These are the programs that allow a customer to buy products, add up the total spent, work out shipping costs and take the customer's details.

For a few products, simple order forms still work well and are faster. With more products you will need one of these cart programs. We are changing to shopping cart software on our sites so we surveyed the many programs available. You might be interested in what we found.

Some important decisions have to be made early on. Do you want a web hosting company to also provide and operate the cart program? Would you prefer to just have the server space and supply the program yourself? Do you have some programming skills available in your operation? How much do you want to spend on the software? Would you like the program to build the web pages for you from a database of your products or to link into HTML pages you make? Do you want to use cookies? How do you see your site evolving in the future?

Web hosting companies, by sharing the same program with many clients, can afford to install expensive software. You are insulated from most of the server side programming. The disadvantage of this approach is you lose some flexibility and the cart software might not be perfect for your product range. The company will probably be charging for the use of its software and might also want you to use its credit card processing, also at an extra charge.

By providing the software yourself, you can find the software that best matches your site. You will need to be careful on the server you plan to use. You need access to the area of the server that runs programs, usually a cgi-bin directory. The drawback of this approach is that you will probably have to learn a little about CGI scripts and Unix commands on your server.

Searching the web for shopping cart programs, you will be surprised at the variation in prices. This software can be priced anywhere from free to many thousands of dollars. The most expensive ones are probably only of interest if you plan to put a supermarket on-line. The free programs are usually either very basic or require you to have fairly good programming skills. Most now seem to be based on the Perl scripting language. For those in the middle, $200 to $500, the price isn't always a good guide to the program's suitability.

There are two basic types of cart software; those using pages built on the fly from a database (dynamic HTML), and those using pre-built web pages, (static HTML). You can find programs that handle either, giving you the best of both worlds.

The beauty of a dynamic HTML program is that the only web page you really need to build is your home page. You enter all the product details like price, description and pictures into a database and upload it to the site. From the home page the visitor can use a program-supplied search engine or links to the database. The program will build a web page showing the products that fit the visitor's request.

Once the visitor finishes with the page, either by buying something or going back to search again, the page disappears. The problem with this approach is you are restricted by the template used to build the web page.

A static HTML program allows you to build web pages that you like instead of what the program likes, and you can have greater variation between pages on the site (not always a good thing). The biggest benefit is you can list individual pages on the major search engines and search engine spiders can find them.

Cookies are a touchy subject as many people do not like a web site to put information on their hard disk. Many users simply switch off the cookie enable on their browser. The problem is the cart software needs to be able track the shopper through many pages of the web site, linking what's been bought to an individual. Cookies are an easy way to do this, but not the only way. Some programs can do this tracking without putting anything on the user's system by looking at the user's Internet provider IP number. Other programs can do both.

So after all that what did we pick? For our new site at http://www.dcothai.com we bought a program called QuikStore, http://www.quikstore.com. It handles both dynamic and static HTML pages and seems to be going through a constant upgrade process. It does everything we need at the moment. It stores the items purchased, calculates some complicated shipping charges, encrypts credit card information, produces an on-line invoice and sends an order confirmation email to the customer. It cost about $200 and was more suitable for us than some priced far higher.

Danny Speight is the marketing director of Proglen Trading Company and has web sites at http://www.dco.co.th and http://www.dcothai.com. He can be contacted at danny@dco.co.th.