Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Ecommerce Hosting & Discussion : what do you really want / need in a cart?

[snowman_sapporo]

OK all,

What do you really want/need in a cart?
Do you want lots of features?

At the same time, what are oscommerce, zencart, oscdox, loaded doing wrong?

[bluedreamer]

If OSC and all the clones separated style from code that would be a step in the right direction!

[snowman_sapporo]

ahhh, the nested table hell. I hear you. Even the 2 template systems still have heavy code usage in them. I've tried moving towards a simple MVC approach but still this is a bit difficult at times without moving to a parsed system like phpBB and such.


Maybe need to go that way

[bluedreamer]

Another things is a simplified checkout - a lot of carts make it very long winded

[snowman_sapporo]

hmmm, how pages are you thinking?

Need to be careful of the amazon 1-click problem.

[bluedreamer]

Well assuming there's stuff in the cart and the user clicks "Checkout"

1st page - Enter names/address(es) and choose payment option or enter username/password to logon

2nd page - is the payment gateway page, either on local site SSL page or 3rd party processor

3rd page - order complete

That's about the least you can get away with.

[snowman_sapporo]

Thanks,

Will definitely work out the checkout system. I'd like to have something that is very configurable for most people. Allowing the shop owner configure the options of which steps to include or not. Possibly a 1-2 page setup.

[bluedreamer]

sounds good - are you building a cart system then?

[snowman_sapporo]

The short answer is yes.

In reality it's a fork. I'm still working out things before I put a call out for beta testing. I figured by posting here that shop owners/actual users would be more willing to gripe and complain and then work from there.

In some ways I like to work from what is "not" working rather than here a bunch of "that's cool" or "nice job" both of these statements are not very informative.

I realize that there are already oodles of forks and solutions but I'm heading to integrate with a growing CMS/Portal type of thingy.

I really do appreciate your comments!

Thanks!

[xelav]

separated code and style - what object model do you really needed?
We use php + smarty but in big projects smarty code looks too hard for using by html-coder. So php is logic level, smarty is view level - maybe 3rd level is needed?