Shopping cart for <10 items

SHopping carts for small stores

[Knackers]

I am doing a site redevelopment for an industry magazine (hard copy). The site is primarily a marketing platform, but the client wants to allow people to be able to subscribe on line.

The client also sells a number of reports (<10) that they would also like to sell online.

I have quite a bit of experience with PHP and MySQL. I have had a hunt through the carts on Hotscripts, but they all seem a little excessive for what I am trying to achive.
I am thinking that I may have to code something up myself, but I would like to avaooid this if possible, because the budget is limited.

Anyone know of anything that might suit my needs?

[lorax]

Greetings Knackers,
Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

At first blush the carts may seem a bit excessive for what you need but if you feel comfortable with PHP and MySQL then you should have little problem in paring them down to suit your needs. I would think this preferable to building from scratch.

But if you've never built a cart before, and/or want to get some experience your project seems like an excellent place to start.

An alternate idea is to use an online cart service like Yahoo stores or somesuch. It's quicker albeit not as flexible.

[quiet_man]

Hi Knackers & Welcome

I'm wondering whether you are asking about just a shopping cart - ie. the functionality needed to store order details - or a full-blown cart/checkout/secure processing mechanism.

With your experience in PHP it should be easy to create something to store and submit order details. But a solution that incorporates secure online payment is something different. I don't think it makes any difference if you only have 10 products or 1000 products.

There are a number of threads about shopping carts and e-commerce basics summarised in msg:#4 of this thread:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[rogerd]

If your host offers free Miva Order that would work for a small quanity of items and be very quick to set up. It's not as powerful as Merchant, but it's very simple.

[Knackers]

Thanks for the responses guys. Very Helpful.

The client already processes credit card info in house, so there is no need for a clearing house or merchant. Basically, all I need to do is get the order fom the customer to my client in a secure manner.

The way I see it, the steps involved would to be:
1. Impliment a shopping cart.
2. Set up an order form in a secure part of the site (means buying a certificate?)
3. Encrypt the order and send to my client.

I guess that is the nuts and bolts of what I am trying to do.

I have looked at mals e-com and it looks like it would do the job, but seems a little bit tacky and doesn't really allow for that much customisation. I think that I would prefer to keep people on site as this seems a little more professional (well, to me anyway).

I am interested in Miva Order. After visiting their website there was no indication of prices as the 'Buy Now' button threw a Fatal Error (not too great for a shopping cart service provider!) I think that they may not be dealing in this product anymore as I couldn't find a link to the Miva Order page from their homepage (just through Google search)

Anyway - the quest goes on...

[rogerd]

The simplest thing might be to find a host that offers free Miva and will let you use their certificate. For incidental ordering, this will save the annual expense of the certificate as well as purchased cart software. The host listed at the bottom of the page here used to offer free Order, but now offers free Merchant, even in their cheapo package. I'm sure others do, too.

[pbreit]

Simple and free: http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/xcl/rec/sc-intro-outside

[edited by: lorax at 7:15 pm (utc) on Feb. 23, 2005]
[edit reason] delinked [/edit]