Shopping Baskets

Retail Web sites clearly need some way for shoppers to select products and place them into a collection of products chosen for purchase. Such collections are most commonly called a shopping basket or shopping cart. The most common way for a Web site to allow the selection of a product for purchase is to include an "Add to Basket" button on a page in a way that it is clearly associated with a particular product.

The normal shopping paradigm also allows shoppers to easily navigate to a page that displays the contents of their shopping basket. Such pages typically display a table with several columns showing the chosen product, the quantity of the product to be purchased, the unit price, and the total price. It is also common for a remove button to be associated with each row in the table. The product quantity is typically displayed in a editable text box so that the quantity can be easily changed. Depending on whether client-side script is employed to detect when such changes are made, an "Update" button might also be required.

The next three sub-sections discuss the support provided by Commerce Server for shopping baskets in each of the three types of functionality: user interfaces, Web sites, and objects.

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