Shopping carts designed for most companies or business in Las Vegas will be very similar to other businesses throughout the United States. Most businesses would like to sell products over the internet, but there are some basics that need to be understood when looking for a shopping cart for your website. An ecommerce site has 3 major components.

• shopping cart
• product administration
• merchant account

The shopping cart is basically the order form, where the customer sees what they are purchasing and all the costs associated with the order, eg item price, tax, shipping, etc, and where you collect information about the customer, eg shipping and billing, and credit card information.

Product administration, is where you can add, edit or delete products. This includes sales price, image of the product and product descriptions, etc.

The merchant account is how you will bill the customer, eg, credit cards, checks, paypal, etc. If you choose to accept credit cards, you can do this automatically, but you need to connect to systems that will check the credit card for fraud, credit limits, etc. There are several ways to handle orders, eg shipping and handling, options, etc.

There are two categories of shopping carts:

1. Custom Designed
2. Standard Pre-packaged

Although, custom designed shopping carts are usually reserved for larger companies, sometimes smaller companies will require something specialized to their business, especially if the products have a lot of options specialized to some particular capabilities that can not fit into a standard shopping cart design. Larger companies either purchase complete application software, such as ERP systems, that include accounting systems that now provide shopping cart functions, or they have created custom shopping cart packages as part of their overall website capabilities.

Simple shopping cart functions are not too hard to develop, but many new functions and capabilities that were once options, have become standard. Many of these innovations were created and implemented first by Amazon, such as product reviews, ratings, and up and cross selling. Shopping cart applications have been designed, with new features and capabilities now standard, such as coupons, limited time pricing and other features such as allowing multiple images for a product, or highlighting featured products.

There are two types of standard shopping cart designed for websites:

1. Online
2. Application packages

Online shopping carts have been designed, such that when a customer wants to make a purchased they are transferred to a secure site where all the product information is stored, including the pricing. The advantage of this type of approach is the software is already set up and hosted by a third party who take full responsibility for the maintenance of the application. Usually, there is a monthly subscription fee, which is usually a function of the number of products. This type of approach requires the least amount of in house technical capabilities, but is usually the most expensive based on a recurring monthly fee and has the least amount of flexibility.

Shopping carts based on a one time purchase fee, have the most flexibility, but require the most amount of technical capabilities, either in house or by using a web design company to install, configure and setup the products. The advantage of this approach is primarily the upgrades that are constantly being developed by the shopping cart design company. Although there is usually a charge associated with an upgrade to the latest version, this cost is a small amount compared to the cost to develop the added capabilities, because the development cost is shared by all customers.

If you need a shopping cart designed for your Las Vegas business, then you should contact Web Coast Design, located in North Las Vegas area and ready to service you with a professional staff of experts who will answer any of your questions.