E-Commerce Shopping Cart in JavaScript and PHP
English: Jewel-Osco – monster shopping cart truck (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In E-Commerce, a “frictionless experience” is often described as the ultimate design goal when it comes to the consumer’s purchasing experience. An easy-to-use, robust shopping cart solution that can easily have any number of diverse types of items added to it, calculate shipping & handling, taxes and any other additional fees (where such apply), provides transparency and immediacy to the customer’s purchase decision. Doing this well can mean the difference between huge sales numbers and lackluster or disappointing sales figures.
Boiling all the Shopping Cart solutions out there to the most common, key functions we should expect a solution to support are:
- Add/Remove items
- Tabulate itemized sub-total
- Calculate shipping & handling
- Calculate taxes & fees
- Tabulate total
- Remember History for later purchase completion
- Purchase/Checkout confirmation process
Other nice-to-have features that begin to move away from basic “Cart” functionality and into holistic E-Commerce platforms, include:
- Multi-Address memory (billing, shipping… home, work, summer, etc)
- Multi-Currency support (switch currency at any time)
- Multi-Lingual support (switch languages at any time, i18n)
- Multi-Layout support (switch look & feel at any time, l10n)
- Storefront & “canned store templates”
- Layout drag&drop/point-click customization (as per SquareSpace, Wix, etc)
- Auto-fill forms (with customers’ stored Address info)
- Auto-billing (subscriptions/recurring payments)
- Notification options for receipt (Email, SMS, Phone notification, etc… in addition to on-screen)
- International Shipment Tracking (parcel status check)
- Returns processing
- 3rd party payment support options (CreditCard, Interac eTransfer via Moneris/PaySafe, PayPal, 2checkout, etc)
- PCI & PA-DSS compliance (possibly by payment gateway deferral for sensitive data)
- Item import/export
- Ratings (star, thumbs up/down, etc)
- Reviews (public or private textual customer feedback)
- Search
- Wish List curation
- Product/Service Recommendations
- Discounts (coupons, limited-time offers, affiliate codes, etc)
- Promotions (buy X get Y, welcome emails, inactive account enticements, etc)
- Loyalty Program (points, rewards, etc)
- Tracking company/brand affinity & engagement
- Inventory Management (real-time RFID, NFC, etc)
- Supply-Chain Management (SCM)
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
- Advertising platform integration
- Analytics platform integration
- Social Media platform integration
There are tons more possible features but those two lists capture the main ones. Having defined a Shopping Cart and our expectations of its basic capabilities, the remainder of this post will summarize how to roll your own super simple yet intuitive E-Commerce Shopping Cart in JavaScript and PHP that gets out of the customer’s way as much as possible, focusing on the first key set of options only; it will also include thoughts on how the base functionality could easily be expanded out to include some or all of the nice-to-haves of a full-fledged E-Commerce platform.
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BC$ = Behavior, Content, Money
The goal of the BC$ project is to raise awareness and make changes with respect to the three pillars of information freedom - Behavior (pursuit of interests and passions), Content (sharing/exchanging ideas in various formats), Money (fairness and accessibility) - bringing to light the fact that:
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