WordPress ecommerce shopping carts are pretty much cut-n-dried - item selection, tax calculation (when and where applicable), shipping fees and a secure transaction. Other WordPress shopping carts offer customer tracking and e-mail confirmations.
If you are a vendor (vs. a shopper) there are a few things you should know about your company's shopping cart:
- How you set up your WordPress e-commerce shopping cart can make or break your business.
- The fewer questions you ask the better.
- Offer customers more information - i.e., the total content of their shopping cart PRIOR to check out.
- Save your shoppers' carts.
- Don't force clients to register on your site.
- Shorter and faster checkout procedures.
- Auto responders give your WordPress shopping cart a more personal touch and may also serve to advertise upcoming products/services.
For the record: the safest method to shop is with a credit card, while the least safe are online checks and ATM cards. The latter two expose your bank account number.
SaaS: What is It and How can It Help your Hosted E-commerce Site
"Software as a Service" is the latest innovation in helping your hosted e-commerce site to succeed. SaaS is becoming more and more popular as people begin to realize that "the annual cost to own and manage software applications can be up to four times the cost of the initial purchase." (Gartner Group, a global IT research firm)
So, in the end companies can spend more than 75% of their budget, expressly set aside for IT on software. At this point, the real question is: what is SaaS?
Understanding Software-as-a-Service
In Layman's terms, SaaS is defined as "software deployed as a hosted service and accessed over the Internet."
The concept of SaaS is often related to ASPs (application service providers) of the 90s, which gave "shrink-wrap" applications to business owners over the net. This was an early attempt at delivering software via internet, but the concept had more in common with traditional on-site applications than with the SaaS applications we know and love today. Also, because the ASPs were built with the intention of being a single-tenant application, their ability to share information with other applications was limited, and they tended to not be so economic when compared to owning an installed, physical counterpart.
Nowadays, SaaS is expected to embody a multi-tenant architecture accessed through a smooth single instance from a client's computer, and provide a variety of feature-rich, online applications. Typically, SaaS applications are offered directly by the vendor or by middleman party called an "aggregator," whom bundles the SaaS gift basket with offerings from different vendors all collected together nice and neat in a unified application platform.
It is common for vendors or aggregators to offer a subscription model for their SaaS services. Part of this fee helps to keep the SaaS architecture maintained so you don't have to deal with software updates or other annoyances. It's also offered at a flat fee for unlimited access to some or all of the application's features by some vendors. Either way you go, usage fees and artes will change from company to company.
As for the juicy technical tidbits of SaaS, everything becomes centralized (which is a confusing word I used before). The provider of the SaaS hosts the application and data - and regularly maintains it with patches and upgrades, once again everything is in a neat neat package. Some vendors even provide interfaces (API) that allow developers to observe application data and functionality, and in turn, create composite applications. Security is another important issue especially for your WordPress e-Commerce site. Every vendor provides a variety of mechanisms to help keep the data safe. They also allow the client to modify specific things like the data schema, workflow and other aspects of the applications uses.
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