Hosting - What is a shopping cart?

A shopping cart is a software application that runs on your website and permits your site visitors to search for a product in your catalog, add that product to a shopping basket and place an order for that product.

A shopping cart integrates with the rest of your website. They are typically links that site visitors can click on.

Shopping carts typically store product details, customer data and other order information in a database. Shopping cart software have an administration area that allows you to manage your product database, adding products, exporting customer orders, etc.

If you intend to sell multiple products from your website, you'll need some type of shopping cart installed on your site to allow visitors to create their own shopping basket and make the online shopping process easy.