Shopping basket ideas for dealing with orders

ade234uk

I have been putting together a shopping cart. I never realised how involved it was. After 6 months on and off working on this project, I have managed to save the products in the table cart using a session id, including product options on top of this.

I am now at a point where I would like to make this order final and store this in another table called orders_complete. This is where it gets confusing again.

How would go about this?
So for example the user has products in the cart, and now wants to pay. Once he/she clicks pay this information gets inserted in to the orders_complete table, which can be viewed later by admin.

Thank you

big_nerd

ade234uk,

You have a couple of choices, however one thing to keep in mind. If the store owner discontinues products, changes prices, etc you want to retain the origional information as it related to the time of the order.

You can use a complex table to hold all values individually, which would make it easier to categorize, search, and build reports off of, or..

you can create a smaller table, with invoice data, total sale$ (good for reports), Currency (may be needed) and Sale Date.

Within Invoice Data, you can set that as "Text" and generate a text-based invoice (perhaps one you would see in an email) which can be recalled.

All of the values can be held within it; and if you change item prices, delete, reinsert items, or change the entire shopping cart design it can still hold the information.

It really depends on the planned usage of the shopping cart - who are you targeting with this product, etc.

ade234uk

The project is for myself. I have built plenty of databases for various projects of my own, but I have never got around to building a shopping cart from start to finish.

When you pay for the goods and enter your cc information, the information from the cart gets written to an html file. This can be viewed in the admin area, under a password protected folder. The good thing about creating an html doc is that you could just drag and drop them from the server to your desktop.

big_nerd

I have built two - up to this point, it is a lot of work.

One was for my cousin; and he changed his mind about things more often than he changed his socks.

This is why I went by way of invoice field. His ability to keep a formal item# naming convention wasn't that great .. this way I only stored information that I needed to build reports on in separate fields, and built a text invoice for the rest.

Good luck!

ade234uk

Ok I have sorted out how you would pay. When the user enters their personal information a user account is created. Information about the user is stored in the users table.

A html document is automatically created with order details and stored on the server.

An email is sent to the customer which links to the order. A username and password is also sent so they can login and view it and also track the status of their order.

blackhorse

You already spent time on this learning curve now.

I think for an experienced programmer to learn how to do the shopping cart from the scratch. You should read the codes such as zen-cart, digested their logics and then you can easily program your own cart.

Actually, just read zen-cart datbase's strucuture of basket table and order table, or as well as customers table, even without reading their php codes, you will almost know why zen cart do this and how you can do your own cart.

This will reduce your learning hours.

By the way, unless your server is really secured like the bank's server. You shouldn't save the credit card information in your own database on your own server. (I am not sure you would or not from your previous post.)

Use the payment gateway services (authorizenet, paypal - you need merchant accounts to save money if your transactions are big.) to handle the credit card. Your server will never ever handle and keep the credit card information.

blackhorse

So if you are using a payment gateway service.

When your client click the checkout button, you should use the cart information (from basket table) to create an order and save the order information to an order table. (check the zen cart database structure.)

Then this order will be sent to payment gateway service, client will input credit card information there.

After payment gateway service approved the transanction, it will send your server a response. You can update the orders information (such as payment_status to be approved, rejected etc.) saved in your database on your server with the payment gateway service's response.

You can either ask the payment gateway service send your client an email receipt, or you can program your server to send out that email receipt.