Shopping carts

Shopping cart is a generic term in internet. When site owners say shopping cart, they usually mean the entire online shopping system.

What will a shopping cart do?

To clarify, we can say that a shopping cart package will

1. present the products,
2. allow visitors to add them to their shopping cart,
3. allow visitors to drop, increase units of products in their shopping cart,
4. handles checkout
5. have an admin area, where we can:
   
   1. manage (add / edit / remove) Products & Categories
   2. view sales & other reports

These are the basic necessities for selling online. Most shopping cart packages will have more features like:

1. member login,
2. product reviews,
3. my wish list,
4. people-who-bought-this-also-bought type of lists
5. image upload through browser, etc.

The list is really big. Here is an exhaustive list of cart features.

And here is a fine shopping cart, which have exhaustive features.

Complete sales portals

A complete sales portal will do all of the above, and will take care of basic content pages like Company Profile, Terms & Conditions. Besides, they also calculate shipping charges for the buyer's location by interacting directly with leading courier company websites. The features list is again endless.

For complete portals, OScommerce or Zen Cart can be a perfect solution.

Shopping cart packages list

Shopping cart packages like php cart, etc., will take care of online sales part of your website. You can use your preferred packages for other parts of your website like, blog, forums, customer support etc.

The Drupal solution

If you prefer to use a seamless solution of using ecommerce, blog, forum, faq etc. in a single website. A complete CMS like Drupal will be an ideal choice.