Shopping Cart Systems

Shopping Cart Systems

Shopping carts in storefronts are provided for the customer's convenience. A customer picks up a shopping cart from the row of carts in the parking lot or at the storefront entrance. The customer pushes the cart around the store's floor during the shopping session, filling it as she goes, until she is ready to check out. The customer then (sometimes) returns the cart to the store when she has finished transferring her purchases to her vehicle. Similarly, when a customer visits an electronic retail storefront, the shopping cart's purpose is to make shopping easy for the customer. To understand the technologies that govern an electronic shopping cart, you need to understand how the technology works.

Scope and Lifetime of an Electronic Shopping Cart

When a customer first enters an electronic retail storefront, the shopping cart application provides him with a virtual shopping cart. It remains with the customer until he places an order and exits the storefront's Web site. Once the order is placed, the virtual shopping cart's contents are cleared and the resources used by the virtual shopping cart are freed. In essence, without further need, the virtual shopping cart is destroyed by the shopping cart application.

Collecting, Analyzing, and Comparing Selected Components

As with a conventional shopping cart, another important aspect of an electronic shopping cart is that the customer can select items after analyzing them thoroughly including comparing different brands and place them in the cart. The ability to hold items and carry them along electronically saves shopping time. Otherwise, the customer would have to pay for each item immediately upon selection and then continue with his shopping. Also, at any time during the shopping process, the customer can view the selected items and compare them with other items.

Keeping Track of the Total Cost

One advantage that an electronic shopping cart has over a conventional shopping cart is that is displays the running total of the items as they're added to the shopping cart. In this way, the customer can keep track of the cost of his selections and compare it to his budget.

Change of Mind

A customer often changes her mind after deciding to buy an item. If the customer notices a better or cheaper item than the one being carried, she can replace the previous selection with the new one. If she overshoots her budget, she may decide not to buy some items or reduce the quantities of the items selected. Electronic shopping carts allow the customer to change the quantities and remove items previously selected.

Processing the Purchase

The electronic shopping cart also helps the merchant do the final billing at the checkout counter. By carrying the total cost of the selected items, the shopping cart saves the checkout system the trouble of adding up the costs. The system simply applies any taxes and surcharges and generates the final bill. Payment is accepted against this final bill.

Hence the shopping cart application forms the heart of the electronic storefront. The shopping cart application binds the customer, the catalog, the inventory system, and the payment system closely. Certain electronic shopping cart systems provide the customer with product recommendations and price comparisons with equivalent products on the fly. Most shopping cart systems are implemented with server-side code. When maintaining shopping cart instances on the server side, some applications allow the user to resume shopping where she left off, if for some reason the shopping session is terminated abruptly. Incidentally, if shopping cart applications aren't implemented with server-side code, they become candidates for electronic shoplifting!

Figures 3-5 and 3-6 show how the shopping cart is integrated with the product catalog and how a customer can keep track of selections during the shopping session.

Figure 3-5. Shopping cart integrated with product catalog

Figure 3-6. Shopping cart contents