This, despite the fact that banks and other financial institutions in Canada continue to have cold feet when it comes to merchant accounts for online store proprietors. To understand the role of each of these elements, let's compare them with shopping in the real world. In the electronic equivalent, the shopping cart is an application deployed by your Web site developer. This cart not only keeps track of all the information you want to show up at checkout time but also tallies up the total cost of the items selected. A shopping cart solution can be as simple as a link that, when clicked, passes the customer into the secure processing area with the price of the item in tow.
Shopping carts get more sophisticated as they provide more flexibility to the store administrator.
Most commercial shopping cart apps let you customize item descriptions based on size, flavour, colour or whatever product features you wish to flag. Others let you build your site offline using templates and wizards and then upload it all at once. The latter type of solution is favoured by many small business owners as it lets them customize their store without the cost of professional programmers and without having to have special services running on their Web host's server. Once customers have chosen their purchases, they head to the checkout where the cashier tabulates the total cost of the purchases and helps them part with the correct amount of hard-earned cash. At the Web store, the visitors who have reached the 'paying stage' of their online shopping experience will be shown a list of the items in their carts one last time giving them one more opportunity to put things back.