Shopping Cart:

• The term for software that is used to make a site’s product catalog available for online ordering, whereby visitors may select, view, add, delete and purchase merchandise.

We’re all pretty savvy people reading this, so I’m certain that you know (at least in vague terms) what a shopping cart is.  Many larger online retailers build their own software for this process, while smaller affiliates and other retail operations often rely on third-party applications to power their stores. Without the shopping cart, e-commerce would be a major hassle and would never have risen to the prevalence it has now.

As an example one of my most frequented online stores, Jay & Silent Bob’s Secret Stash, still uses Yahoo! Shopping to power their cart.  As retail is just a small arm of the View Askew operation, they have relied on this solution to get them through the bare bones online shopping experience.

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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine

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Merchant Account:

• An account with a payment processor for settlement of credit card transactions.  Any merchant that takes credit card orders must establish a merchant account.

Most e-commerce websites have logos of the payment processing companies they use that verify the security of using your credit card.  The top companies that are used by most websites are VeriSign and Authorize.net.

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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine

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