Monday, November 10, 2008

PHP MySQL Shopping Cart Tutorial

Yes, this is a another shopping cart tutorial. I am planning to make this tutorial to cover a more sophisticated shopping cart solution but for now it only explains a basic shopping cart. I will improve it in time so stay tuned.
Here is what we have in this site :
1. Introduction
This page explains the big picture. What kind of shopping cart software we will create. The shopping cart flow, file organizations, requirements and configuration.

2. Database Design
Here you will see what tables do we need and the relation between tables. An Entity Relationship (ER) diagram is also included so you can see the database relation better.

3. Admin, Control Panel
Where all shopping cart administration work takes place. This page explains the basic structure of the admin pages and brief explanation on each admin submodules.

4. Admin, Login
We have to create this one first of course. Making an administrator page without one is simply a crazy move :)

5. Admin, View Category
List all available categories and it's child categories.

6. Admin, Add Category
You can't build the online store if you don't have product categories, right ?

7. Admin, Edit Category
Modify existing categories, to change the name, description or maybe the image

8. Admin, Delete Category
Unused categories can be deleted here.

9. Admin, View Products
List all products in our online shop, search and view by category is also available

10. Admin, Add Product
After finish working with the category pages. We start writing the product scripts.

11. Admin, Edit Product
Modify every aspect of the product

12. Admin, Delete Product
Remove product from the database.

13. Admin, Order Management
Let's see how many orders we have, how many completed orders and abandoned ones.

14. Admin, Shop Configuration
Here we can set several aspects in our shop. For now we can only set the shop information ( name, address, etc ), the currency and shipping cost.

15. Admin, User Management
This page covers adding a user, modify password and delete user

16. Shop, Main page
This is where the customers will go. They will browse around and view the products and hopefully if they're interested enough they'll put some products in the cart.

17. Shop, Browse Categories
Just to add some navigation so the customer can browse around

18. Shop, View Product List
Display all product in a category

19. Shop, View Product Detail
Display detailed information about a product.

20. Shop, Add to Cart
All interesting goodies goes here

21. View Shopping Cart
Customer can view what's in her shoping cart. Probably modifying the product quantity or dump some products ( or even abandon the whole cart ).

22. Shop, Checkout
Our real target, getting the sale.

23. Resources
Some useful online resources like a study on shopping cart usability, shopping cart security issues, alternative shopping cart solutions, etc




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