[prog] shopping cart/storefront advice

[Sue Stones]

It has been a while and it seems that no-one has answered this question.  (If 
they have I didn't recieve the answers).

On Wednesday 04 August 2004 12:19, April wrote:
> Time to try one of those questions I hinted at :)
>
> I'm putting together an ecommerce site (for fun and learning as much as
> anything practical), and am faced with some decisions on the cart.  I
> only intend to accept payment through paypal, and will have to manually
> process every transaction before shopping, so security isn't much of a
> concern.  The problem is, I'm adamant that it can't "look like a
> shopping cart".  I'll need the normal buy/cart buttons, but I'm going to
> want more pictures, layout control, and search engine optimization than
> any catalogue system is likely to offer.

I don't know the answer to your questions.  I will have to look at shopping 
carts myself very soon.  

You don't mention your situation,( what programming exerience do you have, are 
you learinig PHP?), rather you assume that we were in on some previous 
conversation, but its not in my personal archives.  So I can only answer in 
very general terms.

It sounds to me that you are trying to adapt some already written application 
to suit your very particular need.  Why?  Why not write it yourself, it would 
probably be much easier than trying to untangel some very complex code to do 
it for you.  Write it yourself and you have full layout control, you  can use 
as many pictures as you want, and you can add any features your heart 
desires.

But my advice would be when developing a shopping cart don't obsucure the 
function of the shopping cart (to see what I have, how much it will cost, 
wheter I have everything I want, wheter I acidentally added multiples of one 
item) with 'features' ie pictures, searches etc.

When it comes to paying for things you need lots of security.  Just because 
the infomation is going to be dealt with insecurely by you after it is 
retrieved from the net doens't mean you can dispense with security on the 
net.  I am not familliar with pay pall, which is a US system, but even that 
must have some possibility for fraud in it once someone has the customers 
pasword.

sue