Thread: Shopping cart for site

Depends on a number of factors really Belle.

A simple shopping cart is relatively straightforward. You can use a session variable to store the number of items and then a seperate variable for a productid and quantity of each product they add to their cart. Then you can loop through these session variables to build up your cart.

The complication comes if you want to include things like stock levels. If you need to check on whether something is in stock then you need to also add / remove items from stock as they are added to a cart. If a sale doesn't go through, you then need to add those items back into stock. It can get quite complicated.

You then need something to handle the payment gateway. A guess a prebuilt cart package is probably going to be the best way to go.

Someone I know uses RomanCart so you could maybe take a look at this.

Hope that helps.

No experience with that product but this something I would definitely buy rather than build. Google will find many many shopping cart applications or web site. Don't re-invent the wheel here.

They tend not to be cheap -- esp. if they include merchant services (CC processing). However, that should be passed along to the Client, so it would be up to them really to make the cost/benefit decision.