Ten or 15 years ago many of the companies selling goods and services online would have described their ecommerce software as a “shopping cart.” Now, changes in software development could bring the term back.
As ecommerce has changed, so has the software used to conduct business. It has evolved from a simple add-on meant to process payments to a central hub for digital commerce.
Interestingly, omni channel commerce may reverse this trend.
3 Phases of Ecommerce Software Evolution
For the sake of explanation, let’s describe three discernible, evolutionary phases for ecommerce software and associate those phrases with the terms “shopping cart,” “ecommerce solution,” and “ecommerce platform.”
- Shopping cart.Only processes transactions.
- Ecommerce solution.Does everything needed to run an online store, and is relatively easy to use.
- Ecommerce platform. Manages core “ecommerce” functions like the product catalog, sales reporting, and processing transactions. Also acts as a hub to integrate other software.
These phases or eras overlap and the divisions are not perfectly clear. But, nonetheless, it helps us think about ecommerce software.
When Amazon and eBay were getting their start in 1995, ecommerce software was often a simple script added to an existing website to process payments.
In the shopping cart era, you needed to understand (or hire) basic web markup and JavaScript to implement ecommerce. You would need to build a website, set up a database (if you were even using a database), and then integrate your shopping cart.
The Ecommerce Solution Era
Before long, companies such as Yahoo and Miva started to provide specific ecommerce solutions that included all of the software needed to sell online. These solutions required relatively little technical expertise and were relatively easy to use.
Thus, all-in-one ecommerce software became more popular, and the term “shopping cart” started to make a lot less sense given that these so called “shopping carts” were housing product information, tracking inventory, processing payments, providing tools for order processing and label printing, and even enabling basic email marketing.
The Shopping Cart Era
When Amazon and eBay were getting their start in 1995, ecommerce software was often a simple script added to an existing website to process payments.
In the shopping cart era, you needed to understand (or hire) basic web markup and JavaScript to implement ecommerce. You would need to build a website, set up a database (if you were even using a database), and then integrate your shopping cart.