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Consumers find a product of interest by visiting the website of the retailer directly, or do a search across many different vendors using a shopping search engine. Once a particular product has been found on the web site of the seller, most online retailers use shopping cart software to allow the consumer to accumulate multiple items and to adjust quantities, by analogy with filling a physical shopping cart or basket in a conventional store. A "checkout" process follows (continuing the physical-store analogy) in which payment and delivery information is collected, if necessary. Some stores allow consumers to sign up for a permanent online account so that some or all of this information only needs to be entered once.
The consumer often receives an e-mail confirmation once the transaction is complete. Less sophisticated stores may rely on consumers to phone or e-mail their orders (though credit card numbers are not accepted by e-mail, for security reasons). Shopping cart systems - Simple systems allow the offline administration of products and categories. The shop is then generated as HTML files and graphics that can be uploaded to a webspace. These systems do not use an online database.
- A high end solution can be bought or rented as a standalone program or as an addition to an enterprise resource planning program. It is usually installed on the company's own webserver and may integrate into the existing supply chain so that ordering, payment, delivery, accounting and warehousing can be automated to a large extent.
- Other solutions allow the user to register and create an online shop on a portal that hosts multiple shops at the same time.
- open source shopping cart packages include advanced platforms such as Interchange, and off the shelf solutions as osCommerce, Magento, Zen Cart and VirtueMart.
- Commercial systems can also be tailored to ones needs so that the shop does not have to be created from scratch. By using a framework already existing, software modules for different functionalities required by a webshop can be adapted and combined.
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