• Manage everything on the Web!!!
• Set unlimited number of descriptive fields (attributes) for every item.
• Set vague properties of a goods, and customize them during purchase
• Organize treelike classification of goods with unlimited multiplicity
• Organize several different treelike classifiers on a single goods set
• Carry out electronic transactions through CyberCash
• Be rapidly rebuilt and changed on demand

• Flexible interface
• Individual preview forms for every item
• Price calculation, depending on item's options
• Corporative shop: Each vendor has his own catalogue. All vendors and items are lumped together
• Various payments methods
• Various delivery methods
• Statistics

• On the one hand Q-Cart is as an extensible Java framework allowing to develop cross platform e-commerce solutions. Taking into account the high need on the market for custom web based e-commerce solutions we had developed Q-Cart to be easily customizable for such applications.
• On the other hand Q-Cart has default implementation in a form of simple Web application server. It is developed with Java Servlet technology. So it would be deployed virtually on any platform including Unix+Apache, WindowsNT+Microsoft IIS, IBM Web Sphere, Lotus Notes, and many others.

• Platform Independence.
  Thanks to exploiting Java technology both Q-Cart Framework and Q-Cart Shopping Cart Server are platform independent.
• Open Application Solution.
  Q-Cart framework is designed with the goal to simplify development of an open integrated applications. Web Shop developer may integrate even existing web product catalog with the e-Shop application built upon the Q-Cart framework. On the other hand, it is possible to have registered checkout procedures on a per-product basis. 
• Application Scalability.
  Q-Cart design assumes co-existence of a number of Catalog and Checkout components in the same application. This flexibility allows to satisfy very sophisticated functional requirements appearing when developing large web based malls. On the other hand simplicity of Q-Cart APIs makes it usable for small size web e-commerce applications.
• Architectural Scalability.
  Q-Cart framework and server are built upon our Java Foundation Layer application server platform. One of the main features of our Java Foundation Layer is its compliance to EJB (Enterprise Java Beans) specifications. Particularly we plan that in the next couple of months Q-Cart along with our other e-Commerce Libraries (eCL) will work inside any EJB compliant application server. At the same time client part (e.g., web front end) stays untouched. In other words our strategy regarding eCL and Q-Cart is that the solutions built upon these technologies are backward compatible.
• Database Independence.
  Another feature of Foundation Layer (FL) is that it is database neutral. What we mean by that is that FL supports custom object-relational mapping. Practically this means that Q-Cart along with other FL based frameworks is compatible with the following database engines: Oracle, DB2, MS Access, MS SQL, and some others. We have mSQL FL support in alpha version now. Adding ordinary support for a new database into FL usually means about couple of man/days. 
• Open Technology.
  The Web e-commerce solution developed with the Q-Cart would be built with different technologies including our Servlet Library (qs-servlets), plain Java Servlets, Active Server Pages, C/C++ CGI, Java Server Pages. For example it is even possible to integrate this with the existing legacy product catalog system developed as an ActiveX/DCOM application server using special Java RMI/ActiveX bridge.

After making in-depth analysis of our own hands-on experience in the e-commerce area and other solutions offered on the market we have come to the following idea:

• Mostly all web e-commerce applications are partitioned on the Catalog component, Shopping Cart component and Check-Out component.
• Catalog is an abstraction which encapsulates any sort of product and/or service browser/builder. This would be either simple static web pages presenting the price list of a merchant or even some very sophisticated application provided by telecommunication company to their clients and allowing them to customize Service Level Agreements and parameters of the leased Internet (or other) connections. Particularly this would be special application allowing web users to build their own custom mouse pads. One of the main advantages of extraction notion of Catalog is that such approach allows to have multiple different catalogs working inside the same e-commerce application. This enhances Q-Cart scalability and allows to build very large Internet malls serving different vendors with their own product catalogs.
• Shopping cart component is a virtual bag in which user places those items which s/he wants to acquire/buy. However this is sort of a temporary storage for items to buy. Q-Cart framework assumes Shopping Cart objects to be persistent. This means that once user added something to her/his shopping cart this is automatically saved for future use. On the other hand thanks to the abstraction of Catalog component one Shopping Cart may contain products/items/services from a number of vendors!
• Checkout component is an abstraction of a checkout function. Each product vendor may have their own proprietary accounting system and may wish all acquisitions to be registered in their special way. Once we allow shoppers to buy products services from different vendors in the same shopping cart the need to have a generic way to perform check out transactions appears. Each catalog component may provide its specific way to make a checking out for the products/services acquiring from it. Besides a mall owner may wish to have a certain level of control over the performed transactions. On the other hand mall owner may add some additional features to the checkout process. For example, this some Internet mall may allow to performing payments not only via CyberCash but also via the special highly secure proprietary banking network (provided shoppers have special hardware).

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