A cart does just what you would expect; it gathers up products just like a shopping basket or trolley in a supermarket and offers the functionality to calculate the total value of the order according to the number of products in the cart, their value and any tax and delivery charges that are payable.

Carts are a popular option if you do not have many items for sale, so you do not feel the need for a full blown shopping catalogue solution. Without doubt, carts improve the customer experience when compared to forms and some websites even use them in combination with forms to provide that missing level of ‘dynamic’ calculation.

Carts can be very low cost, even free, and you will often find that they are offered by software companies who also sell full shopping catalogue solutions. In this way, the companies are getting you to try eCommerce without committing to the cost and additional work of setting up a full online shop.

It can be quite easy to add a cart to your website. Many carts allow you to add some simple code to the links on your site that passes the product information to the cart. This way you can put product images and descriptions straight in to the html of your web pages or forms but still get the benefits of a cart.

A common way of doing this is to use a 'Buy Now' button that passes the sales information to the cart i.e. number of products, description and price. The cart then allows the user to review their order, change the amount or order more items before paying.

The thing with carts is that if you are ready to start improving the way you offer products to customers, it is often worth just going straight for a full shopping catalogue. Catalogues can be very inexpensive these days and easy to set up. By the time you have put a cart on your site you could probably have set-up your first two or three departments in a catalogue.

Carts have no functionality other than adding up order values. Catalogues on the other hand, offer an exciting blend of sales and marketing functionality to really help you capture online sales.