According to Electronic Commerce in Canada, 2006 saw $49.9 billion in online sales. According to the US Census bureau, ecommerce took in approximately $33.6 billion in the 2nd quarter of 2007 alone, a 6.4% increase over the previous quarter. Obviously, ecommerce has become an important economic activity in north America, one which will definitely continue to increase in the years to come.

What is ecommerce?

Ecommerce stands for electronic commerce. In simple terms, ecommerce functionality takes a website and turns it into an online store in which visitors can make purchases from the convenience of their home or office computers.

At the core of ecommerce is the shopping cart, which is a set of scripts that allows one to add and delete products before entering credit card information and confirming the purchase. The shopping cart allows the online shopper to accumulate products by passing information that the client has entered from page to page.

Ecommerce is available in many varieties. The most common programming languages used are ASP, Perl, Java and PHP in conjunction with a database. Many ecommerce solutions are available. Many are proprietary and use underlying technologyies that are proprietary.

Totalnetqc uses an opensource solution that relies on Linux, Apache, mySQL and PHP (LAMP) to develop ecommerce websites.

Read on to learn more about Totalnetqc's opensource ecommerce solution.