Once you have a secure server up and running you’ll need a shopping cart, which will display the order forms, store orders and calculate costs. In addition to ensuring that your shopping cart can work with your Real-Time gateway (if you decide to do Real-Time credit card processing) you should look for several other primary features:
Easy to install and quick execution
Customizable so that the pages generated by the shopping cart look just like your site
Ability to calculate shipping costs and sales tax
Has all of the features that you will need for the foreseeable future. Otherwise you will be changing platforms soon!
PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) support if you decide to do deferred processing through your own software
Some shopping cart systems you may want to investigate include:
PerlShop
Cart-It
QuickStore
ShopSite
PDG Cart
The Exchange Project
Several of the shopping carts listed above are free, others cost several hundred dollars. It’s just a matter of matching your needs and technical abilities with the software. CGI Resources is the home of a number of Perl-written shopping cart scripts that you can implement on your site. Just do a search on their main page for “shopping carts” and you’ll be presented with a number of scripts to choose from.
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