The online world of ecommerce is one that is projected to experience enormous growth over the next ten years. There are many good reasons behind why the internet has grown so enormously over the past ten or twelve years, since the original .com boom in the early 90s. As the internet has continued to grow and grow, like an electronic tree, the web has become literally inundated with millions of merchants all peddling their wares, so to speak, and trying to cash in on the cow that is the internet money pool.

The purveyor of the .Net Shopping Cart is Microsoft, who converted the technology from their originally and fairly lousy ASP (Active Pages Technology) when they released the .net framework 1.0 in 2002. The newer .Net Shopping Cart technology was created to streamline web services by allowing programmers with a much more powerful and far more secure technology with which to create web pages, shopping portals and secure, effective web applications.

So now that you know the origins, it is time to talk about why it is so effective. Because it uses a more common XML interface and because this type of shopping cart platform is compatible with any computer that has a .net interface installed, which is most computers on the web, a .Net Shopping Cart is actually a web programmers' dream when it comes to creating secure online payment processors that offer the uncompromised transfer of data on the World Wide Web. In fact, more people use either an ASP or a .Net Shopping Cart than just about any other shopping cart application in the world. And for a good number of reasons too.

First and foremost, with this type of system, online merchants and vendors are assured that most people on most computers will be able to use their shopping cart to process a transaction. This means ultimately more money to them. The more people who can access and use the software means that a merchant no longer has to wonder if they are losing credible sales that they spent good marketing dollars to acquire, which are literally being thrown out the window due to inter-compatibility issues between different users.

Furthermore, most .Net Shopping Carts are compatible with all versions of Windows operating systems, and in many cases there are a variety of Direct X plug-ins and other plug-ins that can be offered to the user who experiences incompatibility. Finally, even Mac users will be able to enjoy the creature comforts of the software because most Apples come with a .net interface preinstalled.

When it comes to merchants and designers liking the many positive facets of .Net Shopping Carts, they are all in agreement, they are just far easier to build, take up less online space and are more secure and compatible to a greater number of users. Large credit card batch processing companies have even custom tailored their software just for .Net Shopping Carts because they all know big business when they see it, and to be honest, Bill Gates is the epitome of big business.

Another very positive factor about these sorts of shopping carts is that the code is streamlined on just about every server on the planet earth. In fact, a developer would actually have a hard time finding a host that did not accept the ASP or .NET code. And in the mind of the hosting company, it would be foolish not to offer compatibility with such a widely used and common day application such as this.