Which language should I choose?

The choice of which language may be very important depending on your circumstances. If you or your designers/developers have a particular preference, or your web host only supports some languages, then that will narrow your choice. Most web developers have a preferred language and so may prefer an ASP Shopping cart or a PHP shopping cart for example, although many are "multilingual". If you choose an ASP Shopping cart but your developers prefer a PHP shopping cart, you may be in trouble. ASP.NET shopping carts are becoming increasingly popular, and Cold Fusion shopping carts have a small but faithful following.

Which language is the best? There's no easy answers.

• ASP. ASP stands for Active Server Pages, a technology created by Microsoft. ASP Shopping carts are the most common (although PHP shopping carts are catching up). ASP is a good all round language, and while it has effectively been replaced by the quite different ASP.NET, it is still a strong performer. VP ASP is a very popular ASP shopping cart.
• PHP. PHP is probably the most popular language on the web today, particularly with small and medium websites. There is a wide range of excellent PHP shopping carts. X Cart is a very popular PHP shopping cart.
• ASP.NET. ASP.NET is Microsoft's replacement for ASP. It's an extremely powerful language (this site is created using ASP.NET) and is becoming increaslingly popular with developers, although not yet as popular as PHP or ASP. We are starting to see some quality ASP.NET shopping carts coming out such as Storefront.
• Cold Fusion. There's not many Cold Fusion shopping carts available, but Cold Fusion is a strong language popular with some developers for its ease of use. If you choose this for business reasons, you may find it tricky to find developers who have knowledge of it. CartWeaver have a Cold Fusion shopping cart.
• Perl. Perl is the oldest popular language on the web. There are quite a few Perl shopping carts, many of them well established. Actinic is a popular Perl shopping cart.

Which language is the best? There's no easy answers

Probably the other language worth noting is MivaScript, developed especially for the very popular Miva Shopping Cart. While it is only used by Miva, Miva's popularity made it worth mentioning.

So, what impact does this have on your shopping cart? It will make little to no difference to your customers which language you use. The primary question to ask is what language your developers prefer, and what language your host prefers.