E-Commerce: A Shopping Cart and its Benefits - Essay Example

A SHOPPING CART AND ITS BENEFITS ID Number: of of School Word Count: 936 Date of Submission: August 30, 2011 E-Commerce: A Shopping Cart and its Benefits Introduction The World Wide Web (Internet) has encroached upon the lives of people in many ways. Today, people go shopping, social networking, banking, researching, communicating and doing so many things on-line it is almost impossible to think a life without computers. This trend has a marked effect on how we go about our lives. In the earlier days, people were afraid to shop on a computer because of security concerns such as identity theft and its serious consequences.

Today, that fear has largely been vanished because of improved technology such as the use of the secure socket layer (SSL) which allows for transmission of sensitive personal information over Internet pathways without the risk of that information being hijacked by computer hackers. The SSL has led to the boom of on-line shopping or electronic commerce (e-commerce) and most firms vie a digital presence to enhance their products and services to a wider potential market. This paper is a discussion on a very important component of e-commerce which is the shopping cart.

Discussion The shopping cart as used in the e-commerce of firms having put up a Web site is just a same concept as the shopping cart in real life when we go to brick-and-mortar (real) stores such as a grocery store, a supermarket or a hardware store. The on-line shopping cart is used to put all the items being selected in one convenient place and aggregated so that all these items can then be brought to the check-out counter for payment. Before beginning the check-out process, buyers can first examine all the items they had bought such as quantity of items selected and prices.

Anybody putting up an on-line store with the intention of selling something, such as the product or service they are promoting on their Web site, should use a shopping cart to make it all convenient for their digital customers or it will result in incomplete (abandoned) carts (Pinnacle, n.d., 1). This shopping cart complements the on-line catalog which potential customers look at. Aggregated Shopping Items – the shopping cart icon (or logo) must be present in every page of the Web site or digital storefront (McGaw, 2009, p. 79). A good shopping cart program or software should include a quick summary of the items already selected and put on a shopping cart such as a review of their selections, adjust the purchase quantities, check for prices and their total amounts, how many different items were selected and even remove some items from a cart.

The idea of putting a cart on every Web page is to make it easy, fast and convenient for customer to check-out and make the payment at any point whenever the user gets the itch to check-out any time and not lose the sale. The check-out process should be made simple (user-friendly) so that a customer is inclined to push through with the purchase quickly and without any confusion. There are available programs on the market (off-the-shelf) for shopping cart software programs. A good shopping cart allows everything selected to be put in one convenient place for aggregation.

On-line Payments – the shopping cart performs another very important function and this is to allow for Internet payments to be made to the merchant by funds from a customer's account. The cart integrates an electronic payments solution program or software that will transmit client's personal financial information contained in a credit card, debit card or some other newer forms of stored electronic money. This is called the payment gateway solution that meshes merchants, customers and billing firms or credit card issuers into one seamless on-line sales process.

There are many third-party providers of these payment processing services today on the Web, with most of them either affiliates of card issuers such as Visa or Mastercard. The main use of these service providers is to link on-line merchants in a three-way process involving the client, the digital seller and the credit card companies. It enables the processing of electronic payments by including an authentication process to deter fraudulent purchases and protects both the sellers and the buyers.

All electronic checks or payment transactions can therefore be done securely and safely using a shopping cart that utilizes the SSL encryption technology (with the sign of https:). Increased On-line Traffic – the shopping cart is just a tool to increase sales revenues but the key to that is to somehow drive Internet traffic to a Web site. This can be done through use of search engine optimization (SEO) techniques that will propel a site to the top in page rankings in a Web search using an Internet browser.

Shopping cart encourages a site's visitor to make the buy decision whenever he or she feels like making that important purchase. Some of the best types of shopping cart applications can be found on the social media network of Facebook (Beal, 2001, p. 1); it combines business with social networking in a huge potential market. Conclusion The Internet has change the way people live their lives and one of its most important or desirable changes is the way how people shop today, via on-line purchases.

It makes for efficient and convenient shopping for everyone and this is thanks largely to the shopping cart. The best of e-commerce shopping carts must be user-friendly (for the customer to add/remove items) and for the site owners to install the cart on their sites and increase sales 24/7 (Fox, 2008, p. 166). Reference List Beal, V. (2011, January 31). 5 great Facebook shopping cart apps. Www.ecommerce-guide.com Retrieved from http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/solutions/advertising/article.php/3922846/5-Great-Facebook-Shopping-Cart-Apps.

htm Fox, S. C. (2008). Internet riches: the simple money-making secrets of online millionaires New York, USA: AMACOM Division. McGaw, J. (2009). Beginning Django E-commerce. New York, USA: Apress. Pinnacle.com (no date). Reduce cart abandonment: use drift marketing to bring back the customer to your store. Retrieved from http://www.pinnaclecart.com/shopping-cart-abandonment.htm