Shopping Cart Checkout Help

[janey]

Hello all,

I'm still pretty novice with PHP, and I am working with a simple shopping cart and am stuck on the "checkout" section. I know I am going to use PayPal to process the payment and have that part figured out. What I cannot "conceptualize" is how to get from the "checkout" button to the PayPal form.

The checkout sequence I envision is: when the user is on the "viewcart" page, they would click "checkout" and be taken to a page that requests customization info for the product (baby announcements). After filling out that information, they would be taken to a page that requests their customer information (name, address, etc). Then, they would click the final "checkout" button and the billing would be processed via PayPal.

As I began to think about it, I realized I would have to pass many variables from page to page throughout this process. For instance, the "total price" would have to pass all the way through to the PayPal processing. Similarly, when they enter their customer information, I need to know which order it relates to.

I guess I need some help getting started because I really don't know where to go from here. When the user clicks "checkout", should I assign them a customer ID right there and pass that from page to page, or should I pass their total price? I’ve never used sessions but was wondering if this is a scenario they would be used for? If so, what would you store…everything???

By the way, I am using mySQL.

Thanks in advance for any advice!!

[planetsim]

Id do it in these steps

1) Use Goes to checkout
2) Form with (Name, Email, Address) Hidden feilds of items in basket
3) Add Items being bought in MySQL with clientid, before that add the client to the database to get there clientid
4) Show the details in non-form view if they accept have hidden feilds for values to be posted to PayPal. Also have change details so they can change any before they proces.

Seems a lot of work but it will work as long as you do it correctly.