The Shopping Cart

Clearly the most important element of any online business is the ability to capture sales from customers who prefer to do business online. Unless you only want to provide information about how to get to your store, you probably will want or need a shopping cart.

It is critical that your web developer is familiar with (and experienced in) the setup, maintenence, data backup, and recovery processes involved in all aspects of your shopping cart.

This center of e-commerce is the part of your site that handles all aspects of order collection as well as the flow of money and order processing. If this crashes between backups it won't be pretty. Especially if you have unredeemed gift certificates in the database.

Your service provider should have measures in place to prevent a catastrophic loss of data but you would do well to regularly back that data up on your own. Fortunately I have a tutorial that shows you just how to do that. Also I can easily restore any data to any cart I have installed.