The days of the one-size-fits-all shopping cart are dead. What's
needed is a toolkit which provides developers with the basic
functionality required to implement a cart, i.e. payment processing
libraries, interfaces to shipping APIs, customer authentication and
order persistence. If done right, a solution like this could allow
developers to get up and running faster than would be possible with
an entirely custom solution *or* a canned solution. Not to mention
it would be much more extensible and maintainable over the long-term.
- Nate
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2007 16:52:08 -0800
From: "inforequest" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [nyphp-talk] Shopping cart -- revisited...again...
To: [email protected]
Cliff Hirsch cliff-at-pinestream.com |nyphp dev/internal group use|
wrote:
Like many on here, the whole shopping cart thing is a mess to me.
So...I just installed litecommerce, which was fairly painless. And
changing
the templates, which use Flexy, was fairly easy. But deciphering
the PHP code
is a nightmare. Who ever said OOP is easy? It just seems to
obfuscate the
meaning of things. Something as simple as tracking down the origin of
order.details.error, which is in a template, becomes maddening.
.....................
I am thinking of getting X-Cart because at least it is fully open
source. But
it’s developed by the same people, so the code may be equally
confusing.
OSCommerce and its derivatives are out — too many bad stories. Any
other
ideas? Is it too much to ask for a great, easy to modify cart? The
cost of the
cart is trivial compared to the cost of the custom code, time,
maintenance,
aggravation, etc.
Happy holiday,
Cliff
I think as far as shopping carts are concerned, we are in the era of
charge by the hour programming. That is where the money is.
I also think it's time to redo the ecommerce platform. We have
moved far
beyong where we were when OSCommerce was built, and far beyond
skinning
(Zen cart). We don't need a new model for a shopping cart based *web
site*, but a new model for ecommerce functions we can integrate
into our
modern web sites. To me that is *not* Shopify et al., because they
charge too much without assuming much if any of the risk in a
transaction. A few percentage points might seem like little at first,
but if it is cream off the top and doesn't reduce liability, it's
waste
and waste needs to be eliminated. I think it is foolish to take on a
recurring cost for design (eventhough that is a sweet deal for them).
Right now every successful store I see is hand coded from scratch, and
severely platform dependent. I don't see a lot, but I've seen a
dozen or
so in 6 months.
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