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What is a shopping cart?

A shopping cart is special software that allows your site's visitors to buy some goods and pay for them. This is a similar functionality to a real shopping cart in your mall, where you can put various goods you want to buy, and then go to the counter and pay for them It is a great feature when you want to have an online shop or other commercial website.
Many hosting companies offer shopping cart scripts with their hosting services. You can put these scripts for free on your website, and use them to collect information about visitor's orders. They will help you with the automation of your selling process, by tracking who bought what, when and how much, sending you customized emails with order contents, etc.
However, in many cases you will need to sign up with another provider to process credit card payments, in order to obtain the so-called merchant account. It is a special account for processing online credit card payments. You will have to supply your merchant account information to your shopping cart software in order to process these payments.

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