Earlier this year Google announced the opening of Chrome Web Store during its I/O conference. Google showed a presentation to a room of game developers at the GDC Europe conference. According to the presentation Google showed off the Chrome Web Store, a marketplace for HTML5 apps. The presentation also revealed some new details about Google’s new app store. According to the presentation, the Chrome Web Store is launching in October.

Google Chrome users who find web apps in the store will be able to create convenient shortcuts in Chrome for easy access. Also, developers will have the option to easily sell their apps through the store using a convenient and secure payment system.

Facebook and Apple, Goggle’s two biggest enemy have been threatening Google’s dominance of the web through two distinct platforms, social media and mobile. Facebook on one side shows no signs of stopping which creates a real threat to core search and advertising businesses of Google. On the other side, Apple has already attracted a huge number of developers to its iOS platform and hence products like iAds eating into Google’s profit.

The search engine giant Google is pitching its marketplace as a huge platform for gaming. It’s sure to be a main selling point of Chrome OS, which is supposed to launch later this year. The Chrome Web Store gives Google a path to competing with game consoles through integration with Google TV. It could even become the app platform for the company’s much-rumored Google Me social network.

To know more information about Chrome Web Store visit chrome.google.com/webstore

Hence , as solution providers , our first task is to understand how a website owner wants his shopping cart to perform , what is his exact requirements , who his prospective site visitors are going to be , what expertise level are they at – before we start pitching for the project with a quote . If you ( reader of this post ) are a prospective customer , please take a little time and provide us with details such as how much is online payment important to your e-business , do you need to constantly update your products and prices , would you be interested in having cross selling of items on your pages , do you need to have multiple product / item categories and sub categories , will your customer be searching for products or will he be categorically viewing different options , do you sell egoods / services or will it include shipping etc .

Also important questions are : If your cart will be used for lead generation , do you wish to have multiple emails – for customer, for admin ; is it important for you to track how the visitor arrived at your cart , which items he expressed interest upon , which he selected and then removed ?

If your cart is not for end users , but for distributors , who would be selecting items in bulk and saving them in personalized accounts and printing them , do you want them to provide any other options such as discounts , save searches etc ?

Apart from the use of the cart , being on the topic , i should also like to mention : even though we have good expertise on developing custom shopping carts , there are also some open source alternatives available , which provide similar facilities . Quite a few of our existing customers had given us specific projects , where we had to customize oscommerce , and zencart etc . The advantages are well known , so it is probably not required to be detailed , but what i sometimes feel is a shopping cart , like a CMS is better made with custom requirements , instead of being a ready made package , because ready made packages comes with design ideas , functionality which has been conceived not by you – thus you would be often be forced to adher to the ways specified by the package , and spent time learning a plethora of features and documentation , which may or may not be required for your website and website visitors .