Shopping Cart

Currently resdesigning an e-commerce site and wanted to know if besides the shopping cart model is there anything else that is used?

My personal feelings are to go with the shopping cart because people are comfortable with it and know what it is.

I can't personally think of anything besides the shopping cart model. And even if there was something else, I think I'd be hesitant to use anything that the general public is not familiar with.

Regarding shopping carts, there is one feature some have that really bugs me - when you have to register BEFORE seeing prices, shipping charges, etc. I don't want to give up any information until I've made the final decision to purchase.

If you have a small number of items you can place them on an .html order form. When the customer fills out the form and presses the submit button it will send the data to a perl script... The script will total the money, apply your shipping algo and return a confirmation page to the customer. If the customer accepts, a concatenated string of items purchased along with the amount due will be passed with hidden variables to your credit card gateway who will serve back the request for credit card details.

I used one of these for a couple years but then my inventory grew to a few hundred items a shopping card was needed because the form was getting way to big... but it worked better than any shopping cart that i have tried.

Coolcart shows the totals up front, before any data is entered by the customer - but to make that happen you must use postage rates that are independent of zip code.

Most carts do, in fact - there are just a few, like X-Cart, that require the customer to register first. I don't have a problem entering a zip code to get accurate shipping costs, but not anything personally identifiable.

Right, the websites that expect me to type in my life history before showing me the shipping charges get an abandoned shopping cart most of the time.

I use the RTCart shopping cart. It doesn't require any upfront info before showing the price. Some webmasters balk at the $5/month charge and $300.00 startup fee, but I've seen an increase in orders since signing up for it so it paid for itself many times over.

If you want a nice robust e-commerce solution with great support I think Miva is quite good. You can get it free with hosting packages . Just make sure you get it through a preferred host - There are several, if you are interested I have a link somewhere that reviews miva hosts. What ever you do, keep away from a plus net

My site uses Miva, so feel free to take a look.

We are talking about a bunch of different shopping cart options here.... does anyone know of an inexpesive option that posts your sales to a secure webpage so that you can just print the report and fill the orders, rather than processing from email messages?

What is considered inexpensive? You can do a Miva cart quite inexpensively as it usually comes free with hosting at certain hosting companies. Just be careful who you choose since many of the bigger ones suck at support.

Does Miva post reports that tell you the names, addresses, items ordered and $ for all transactions that have credit card processed?

Yes, Miva is a full fledged e-commerce system that does everything that big sites like Amazon . com do (Well maybe not quite that much, but you get the idea)

One thing I love about miva is the support community available. My site is run via miva, see my sig if you are curious about it. It's fully customizable and interfaces nicely to your site (with some work tho). It interfaces easily with most payment gateways, has a ton of third party support if the stock miva is not enough. Theres also another commerce package written in php that is totally free - I can't think of the name at the moment but if you want me to find out I can report back.

I need to check it out. Thanks Timothy

EGOL - I might be interested in using this option on one of my sites. Do you have any script names you could drop?

Thanks, Gringo.