Flexible shopping cart
Shopping cart development has become an area of high activity. There are many different shopping carts available. These are components that can be plugged into your Website. A shopping cart holds your items when you’re shopping online. A good shopping cart should be flexible enough to let the customer see the details of what he’s planning to buy. It should be accessible from every page on the site, and should allow the customer to make changes to it—like removing an item, or adding more. It should also allow him to return to the original page before he entered the cart. It should be able to show the names of the products in it, as well as their prices.

Price
Needless to say, an online shop is in direct competition with its brick-and-mortar counterpart. Therefore, pricing becomes a sensitive issue. If you’re selling groceries online, then your prices should compete against the local grocery shop, or at least the local posh market. Otherwise, a customer would prefer to walk out of the house and buy it from the shop. You must also offer discounts and special deals to attract customers.

Modes of payment and security
The most important aim for an online shop is to make a customer’s experience completely hassle-free. Mode of payment becomes a critical issue here. Being on the Internet, your online shop is accessible to anyone across the world. Therefore, limiting the mode of payment could cause a loss of customers from across the world. That’s why your site should provide all payment facilities. It should accept credit cards (both rupee and dollar), and also accept other methods like cash on delivery, check, or demand draft.

When online payment comes into the picture, security becomes a major issue. In fact, there’s still a lot of fear about sending credit card information over the Net. Therefore, a site has to ensure complete security to a customer making online payments. To start with, it should have a privacy policy prominently displayed on the Website. Where credit card payment is concerned, a secure server becomes a must. This should be able to encrypt all credit card information traveling from the customer’s Web browser to the online shop’s server. Even customer registration information should be encrypted. One thing we noted while doing this story was that order confirmation e-mails from some sites contained our credit card number. This must be avoided, as e-mail can be intercepted, or sent to the wrong recipient. The latter is a common phenomenon on free-mail Websites. If an order confirmation is to be sent, it shouldn’t include the customer’s credit card number.