Shopping cart software greatly simplifies the selling of products and services from your website.

Shopping cart software works like this: You enter the items you have for sale on your site using the inventory feature of the software package. When a person comes to your site the can browse your site and select items they want to purchase. The software tracks the user’s session (usually using a cookie) and keeps track of all items that were selected from your inventory. When the person has selected all of the items they wish to buy, they enter the checkout process. The shopping cart software usually handles all aspects of the checkout transaction including creating the invoice, calculating the total charge and handling the credit card transaction.

If you have a website and you want to add shopping cart software, there are a number of companies online who can help you get started. These companies will provide you with the right shopping cart software for your site and handle the entire transaction for you and many will even provide shipping of your products for an additional fee. This service is typically provided as a percentage of item’s sale.