E-commerce involves online buying and selling through an e-commerce website. E-commerce applications are software programs designed to support the creation of an e-commerce website or add functionality to it, such as shopping carts and payment options. These applications can be open source or proprietary and written in various computer languages. Other e-commerce applications include faxing, creating a business dashboard, and providing shipping forms or currency exchange tables. Plug-ins for personal and business sites are also available.
E-commerce is the buying and selling that is conducted in an online environment, through an e-commerce website. An application is a software program designed to perform one or more tasks in a particular software environment. An ecommerce application is a software application specifically designed to support the creation of an ecommerce website or add functionality to it. Plug-ins and add-ons for e-commerce website software are included, but applications that do not have a specific e-commerce utility will not be considered. What is integral to one ecommerce site may not be necessary at all for another.
Typically, e-commerce applications refer to the wide variety of shopping cart programs available, as well as other software that incorporates payment options as plug-ins or as part of an entire site application. Shopping carts can only add the shopping cart itself to a website built with software that was not specifically designed for ecommerce and has no special ecommerce functionality in its basic configuration. Alternatively, it can actually be built upon an online store that includes a product catalog, search function, checkout, stock control, shipping, and the means to accept payment in various ways.
An ecommerce shopping cart application can be open source or proprietary. If it is an open source product, it will likely be offered under the GNU GPL (Gnu’s Not Unix! General Public License). It can also be written in several computer languages. There are several examples of open source e-commerce applications written in Linux. There are also shopping carts for ASP.NET (Active Server Page for dot-net, also known as ASP+), PHP (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor) and MySQL (Structured Query Language), HTML (HyperText Markup Language), JavaScript® and Perl (Extraction Practice and Report Language).
Other ecommerce applications cover a wide range. For example, there is an e-commerce application that allows business owners to send and receive faxes through their email accounts. Another ecommerce application can allow a business owner to create a business dashboard based on website data. Another function is to provide a shipping form or exchange currency tables. Useful for e-commerce sites, but not generally referred to as an e-commerce application, is the plug-in that offers features widely used on personal and business sites, such as calendars, statistics packages, and surveys.
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