Shopping Cart Software

There are different types of Shopping Cart Software and they differ not only in the complexity and features being offered but also in the technology or coding platforms used. Perhaps the simplest of Shopping Cart Software is a JavaScript Shopping Cart Software. With a little HTML knowledge you can install a simple JavaScript Shopping Cart Software and even make some minor customization changes.

The JavaScript Shopping  Cart  Software  essentially uses  cookies to store customer purchase information. Whatever computation the JavaScript Shopping Cart Software does, it is done via the customer’s own browser. For this reason, the JavaScript Shopping Cart Software is said to use “client side scripting”.

Since everything happens on the ‘client side’ via the client’s own browser, there is very limited communication between the client’s browser and your web server. This results in JavaScript Shopping Cart Software having very limited interactive ability.

The JavaScript Shopping Cart Software can also be very slow and often unreliable because your customer might not only use different browsers, but might also use obsolete browser version – one in which the JavaScript Shopping Cart Software might not work well. So while plenty of free JavaScript Shopping Cart Software is available on the net and it is easy to install and use, the JavaScript Shopping Cart Software might not really be an ideal choice for the serious businessman.

The next type of Shopping Cart Software available is the cgi or Perl Shopping Cart Software. This is requires you (or your web designer) to have knowledge of Perl scripting. It also requires the presence of the Perl (cgi directory) on your web server. Perl Shopping Cart Software requires some knowledge, skill and experience to modify as well as install.

The most common web hosting platform today is the PHP web hosting platform. Because of this, most of the Shopping Cart Software available is written in PHP and designed to be used on Linux web servers. PHP is even more interactive and sophisticated than PERL and therefore needs considerable knowledge, skill and experience to install and modify to suit your requirements. PHP Shopping Cart Software is easily integrated with MySQL database. Integrating your Shopping Cart Software with a database is ideal because it can easily pull out information from the database and make your Shopping Cart Software even more interactive, efficient and a pleasure to use.

In many ways PHP Shopping Cart Software is ideal because it is economical to purchase, economical to use because it requires a Linux web servers and these generally cost much less than other types of servers. Also, there are many more PHP web designers, web developers and web masters than for other coding platforms.

The next type of Shopping Cart Software is the ASP Shopping Cart Software. The ASP Shopping Cart Software is almost identical to the PHP Shopping Cart Software. The only difference being that instead of PHP this Shopping Cart Software uses ASP coding platform and a Microsoft Windows Web Server. It also uses MsSQL or Ms Access database. It is as versatile and interactive as the PHP Shopping Cart Software but costs a bit more to purchase and use. The additional expenditure is because the ASP Shopping Cart Software uses the Microsoft platform which is generally a bit more expensive. The one advantage that Microsoft database (MsSQL) has over its Open Source Rivals (MySQL) is that, it is generally considered to be bit more secure. However, if your database is not going to store sensitive information such as customer credit card numbers, etc. then MySQL should do quite well.