Understanding catalogues & shopping carts - how they work and just what is involved in adding these elements to your web site.
This is intended to be a very brief discussion on the topic. There are complete web sites that are dedicated to both of these discussion items!
Web Catalogues
Basically a catalogue is a database driven routine that presents products online. It may be in the form of a photo gallery for example, or even an area of a web site that provides information and images of products. The routine allows the site owner to login and upload the information through a formal process that is easily performed using a screen by screen system.
Web Based Shopping Carts
The shopping cart is simply a catalogue system that has an added routine that associates a price and a trolley or basket system whereby the site user places items into a trolley and proceeds to the checkout for payment.
At the checkout point several key issues have to be taken care of. Firstly is availability, second is shipment and subsequent shipment address plus taxes as well as the payment gateway interface to the bank or credit card facility; Paypal for example.
Web Routine Issues
There are many issues to be dealt with by the database driven catalogue or shopping cart routine. From a development perspective you have to have the information flow and payment gateway literally "fool proof" and 100% secure. This is one aspect of online business that cannot be overstated at all. A good routine will win customers and business; a poorly designed system will simply turn people away!
At Queensland Net we have had years of working in the accommodation industry and witnessed first hand, many interfaces that just never worked at all for anyone; visitor or site owner! A good commercial routine has to be so simple, easy and have a natural path for the user to wander through to get his/her products or services.
Database Resources
The instant that you add a catalogue, email newsletter system or a shopping cart to a web site you begin to raise the dependance on the host server's resources. Basically all the web browser does is "print" the result of the routine enquiry to the database that is generated from the web site. So all the "heavy" computing is done at server level. Consequently a hosting server for a database driven site has a higher specification and runs far fewer web sites as the resources that every database driven or "dynamic" site uses is far higher than a static web site.
Often you can see major web sites struggle for resources. The Trading Post was an incredibly well designed web site years ago that was relatively fast at processing the enquiry from the online search. These days it is owned and operated by the same company that does the Yellow Pages site. These sites are great examples of what not to do! They are tremendously slow, have high "peak out" times when no result or an error is served as a result; the information that you type into the search box is stripped out when you return back to the search page, the results are often dubious and a search for Cairns can provide Tasmanian content.
I am not picking on this group, however these are business sites that are poorly designed, but above all else under resourced. The fundamental computers do not have the ability to handle the workload that they are experiencing.
Some sites that do work are Domain; Real Estate, Boat Point, Drive, Car Sales to mention a few. All of these large sites have excellent underlying resources with enough raw processing power, RAM and internet connectivity to perform the task that is required. The basic programming behind them is not that different to the aforementioned sites, but the resources have a huge impact on the user experience. Web is all about user experience! If it is too slow, if there are errors and time lags the site user will not stay around to wait.