Re: Shopping carts
On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 9:22 PM, Dan Jenkins d...@rastech.com wrote: Again, no customer information is to be stored on the server, and no login to purchase is required. ZenCart normally requires customer registration, but Google results imply there's a guest-checkout sort of module/extension available. Never tried it, myself. We want to retain the current ordering system indefinitely (one form per item and immediate payment for each purchase). Any particular reason? Buying a single item is usually just treated as a degenerate case of buying multiple items. I know I've seen sites with a Add to cart and checkout now sort of button (in addition to the Add to cart button), which would seem to be much the same thing. You're free to do whatever you want, of course; I'm just thinking the less integration work you have to do, the better. We do not want to perform credit card approval through the shopping cart for several reasons. Sure, sure. It's not uncommon for a commerce operator to process payments offline. Some of my experience with Zen Cart was with a wholesaler who wanted their customers (the retailers) to have a catalog they could pick from, and build a shopping cart of stuff they wanted to order, but payment (including shipping fees) was the domain of reseller agreements, with invoicing, consignment options, etc. So I had to write dummy payment and shipping modules that didn't do *anything*. Prolly the easiest programming I've ever done. :) So, the goal of the shopping cart is simply to aggregate multiple orders into a single order settlement. It does seem like a fairly simple task, however, none of the carts I've examined appear to handle this scenario. To me, it seems like, if you have an existing catalog and checkout in place, and you want to keep them, building the cart software yourself would be easier than trying to adapt an existing system onto your code. Store a list of product IDs in a cookie. When the user clicks Add to cart, add the current product ID to the cookie. When the user clicks Checkout, iterate over those IDs and call your existing checkout for each. Yes, this is code you have to maintain, but you'd have to do just about the same amount of work to call out to something else. The only thing that you wouldn't have to write yourself otherwise would be the code to list the contents of the card for the user to review. Is generating an HTML table really that big a deal? :-) But hey, if you want, grab a copy of ZenCart and start hacking out anything that's not the cart code. :) -- Ben ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Shopping carts
I am looking for a shopping cart solution to add to several existing web sites I admin (all are LAMP, generally Perl or PHP coding). Basically, I want to be able to programmatically add items to the cart, preferably by a HTTP request (something like this: http://addcart.example.com?item=1234desc=Item_being_soldprice=3495.00. (I do not have source code for all the components of some of the sites, and this method will work for them.) The request can be limited to originating from the same server via localhost interface, if needed. A separate request would check-out. The order would be encrypted and emailed (again, to a local email server). I'm comfortable with Perl, PHP, Python, and can work with most others. Any suggestions? Thanks. -- Dan Jenkins, Rastech Inc., Bedford, NH, USA - 1-603-206-9951 +++ IT Technical Support Service for four decades ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Shopping carts
On Wed, 2011-02-09 at 16:44 -0500, Dan Jenkins wrote: Basically, I want to be able to programmatically add items to the cart, preferably by a HTTP request (something like this: http://addcart.example.com?item=1234desc=Item_being_soldprice=3495.00. (I do not have source code for all the components of some of the sites, and this method will work for them.) No suggestion for a cart, but that URL scheme would seem to allow people to name their own price. I'm sure that you have ways to control the price, but publishing that URL as a suggested interface makes me nervous. -- Lloyd Kvam Venix Corp DLSLUG/GNHLUG library http://dlslug.org/library.html http://www.librarything.com/catalog/dlslug http://www.librarything.com/catalog/dlslugsort=stamp http://www.librarything.com/rss/recent/dlslug ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Shopping carts
On Wed, Feb 9, 2011, Dan Jenkins d...@rastech.com wrote: I am looking for a shopping cart solution to add to several existing web sites I admin ... ... The url would be invoked solely via a localhost interface from one program to the receiving cart ... ... A separate request would check-out ... ... The actual order must, in most cases, be manually processed ... ... The order would be encrypted and emailed (again, to a local email server ... You might want to clarify what you're looking for here. Most commerce systems I've used assume a human being using a web browser at the other end of an HTTP transaction. They present the catalog, allow the human to pick products from that catalog and put them in the cart, and then checkout -- enter payment and shipping info. The UI is done via HTTP and HTML and a web browser. HTTP cookies track cart state (or at least, a session ID). You're saying you want to submit items via local channels (thereby implying you'll do the catalog, too), checkout via local channels, submit order info via local channels... what exactly does that leave for the commerce system to *do*? :-) When it comes to the server side of commerce systems, I've only ever really dealt with Zen Cart (a fork of osCommerce). It gets the job done, and is a relatively simple system and thus easier to fit into one's head. And free. There's a strong user community web forum. There's a web knowledgebase, which is good because the code I had to deal with was not well commented. The design didn't strike me as overly modular. So it might be tough to adapt it to... whatever it is you're doing. -- Ben ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: Shopping carts
On 2/9/2011 8:54 PM, Benjamin Scott wrote: On Wed, Feb 9, 2011, Dan Jenkins d...@rastech.com wrote: I am looking for a shopping cart solution to add to several existing web sites I admin ... ... The url would be invoked solely via a localhost interface from one program to the receiving cart ... ... A separate request would check-out ... ... The actual order must, in most cases, be manually processed ... ... The order would be encrypted and emailed (again, to a local email server ... You might want to clarify what you're looking for here. Most commerce systems I've used assume a human being using a web browser at the other end of an HTTP transaction. They present the catalog, allow the human to pick products from that catalog and put them in the cart, and then checkout -- enter payment and shipping info. The UI is done via HTTP and HTML and a web browser. HTTP cookies track cart state (or at least, a session ID). You're saying you want to submit items via local channels (thereby implying you'll do the catalog, too), checkout via local channels, submit order info via local channels... what exactly does that leave for the commerce system to *do*? :-) When it comes to the server side of commerce systems, I've only ever really dealt with Zen Cart (a fork of osCommerce). It gets the job done, and is a relatively simple system and thus easier to fit into one's head. And free. There's a strong user community web forum. There's a web knowledgebase, which is good because the code I had to deal with was not well commented. The design didn't strike me as overly modular. So it might be tough to adapt it to... whatever it is you're doing. Yeah, my description is poor. A little background might make it clearer. I admin some web stores. They carry unique items. I mean unique exactly: there is one of each item being sold. I already have a catalog system, which works fine. When someone orders an item, a single order form is created, from which the customer checks out by completing the form which is encrypted and emailed internally. Customers do not have to login to purchase, and no customer information is retained on the server at all. The immediate task I want is to create a shopping cart, which allows a customer to add items to the cart and continue shopping, and then check out, get an order form with all the items included and complete one step for payment (instead of one per item). Again, no customer information is to be stored on the server, and no login to purchase is required. We want to retain the current ordering system indefinitely (one form per item and immediate payment for each purchase). We want to provide the optional shopping cart system for those who choose that. Additionally, the shopping cart would allow us to handle non-unique items (parts, accessories, and such), which we currently handle entirely manually. We do not want to perform credit card approval through the shopping cart for several reasons. So, the goal of the shopping cart is simply to aggregate multiple orders into a single order settlement. It does seem like a fairly simple task, however, none of the carts I've examined appear to handle this scenario. To add complication, we have an auction site which needs a very similar solution. It is a closed source solution. To compound the issue, the number of web stores is due to proliferate twenty-fold in the near future to boutiques for each class of good. Some of those boutiques will sell non-unique items primarily. So, a single, simple shopping cart (for want of a better name) should work for all of these separate needs, and provide a consistent interface across all the sites. The last complication My hypothetical interface was just a suggestion. Other methods would be fine. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
