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How
the Shopping Cart Has Evolved
First
step
- the shopping bag: In 1911 the owner
of an old-style grocery store was
looking for a way to give business a
boost. He noticed that his customers
purchases were limited by what they
could conveniently carry home, so he
set about devising a way to help them
buy more at one time. He developed
the right solution - a prefabricated
package, inexpensive, easy to use, and
strong enough to carry a lot of
groceries.
 Second
step
- wire shopping baskets were
introduced. Unfortunately they became
heavy when loaded with many items. The
food shopping customers had a tendency
to stop shopping when the baskets
became too full. How could the basic
drudgery of grocery buying be
eliminated, and the volume of grocery
sales greatly increased? In
retrospect, a wheeled cart may seem
the obvious choice. It wasn't,
judging from some earlier efforts to
increase customers' carrying capacity.
Third
step
- 1937 was a monumental year for the
grocery shopping industry. Sylvan
Goldman introduced the first shopping
cart to his Piggly-Wiggly grocery
store, changing the way customers
shopped for groceries, forever. The
first shopping cart was a mixture of
two wire baskets set atop a
buggy-style cart. The cart seemed
almost too cumbersome to push around a
store; most shoppers were plenty
comfortable with baskets and even
resisted the change. Mr. Goldman
managed to entice his customers with
his new idea by using decoy shoppers
to model the use of the cart. The
concept took off, and Sylvan Goldman
became a multimillionaire and legend.
As time passed by, the two-basket
levels became just one large basket
with a lower shelf.
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What
is an eCommerce Shopping Cart?
A shopping
cart is a software application
that typically runs on the
computer where your website is
located (the Web server) and
allows
your customers to do things such
as search for a product in your
store catalog, add a selected
product to a cart, and place an
order for it.
The shopping
cart integrates with the rest of
your website. In other words,
there are typically links on your
Web pages that customers can click
which allow them to perform some
of the functions described above.
For example, many eCommerce
websites have a "search" link
which appears on every Web page as
part of the navigation area. The
link points to products within the
shopping cart.
Shopping
carts are written in a variety of
different programming languages.
Some of them provide full access
to the "source code", thus
allowing experienced programmers
to make modifications to the
system features, some others
don't. Some shopping carts run on
Windows Web servers, some on Unix,
others on both. In most cases, you
can place the shopping cart on
your Web server simply by
transferring its files there using
any FTP software, where FTP stands
for File Transfer Protocol.
For example, our shopping cart
software - called
PHPeCart - is a collection of
PHP files that is placed on a
Unix server.
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 Typically,
all eCommerce shopping carts share the
following structure. A shopping cart
normally includes:
● a database
that stores information such as
product details, customer data, order
information, etc.
● a storefront
that displays this information to
store visitors.
● an administration area that
allows you, the store administrator,
to manage your store. For example,
this is where you add products, set up
shipping, payment options, process
orders, etc.
Because most of the information is
contained in a database, the shopping cart
creates pages in "real time" when a
customer visits an eCommerce store and
requests a specific page. Unlike the HTML
pages that likely make up most of your
website, the shopping cart pages don't
exist until a customer requests one.
The page is dynamically generated by the
Web server by retrieving data from the
database. So a business that has 4,000
products does not actually store 4,000
product pages on the Web server. The pages
are created on the fly when a
customer visits and looks for a specific
product.
 PHPeCart
uses a technology created to store pages
from a PHP database. Other shopping carts
may use different technology, such as CGI,
Ruby on Rails, or Cold Fusion. The process
remains the same. Information is retrieved
from a database, and displayed to the
customer within the graphical interface
that the store administrator has created
for the store. Different shopping carts
offer administrators different levels of
flexibility in setting up how the pages
will look.
With PHPeCart, once the shopping cart is
created, our staff can maintain it, or the
customer can do additions, changes and/or
product deletions. This cart has
progressed well beyond the bag or basket,
or even a wire cart on wheels.
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Some eNewsletter & Cart Customers
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Graphic Design
● Business Cards
● Brochures
● Postcards, Rack Cards
● Print Media
● Signs & Banners
Internet Marketing
● Shopping Carts
● Forms & Databases
● Self-Update Websites
● Flip-Page Booklets
● Web
Hosting
● eMail Contact Forms
● eMail Cloaking
● Favicon Creation
● Blogs
● eNewsletters
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