PHP 5 e-commerce Development- P7 ppt

Chapter 1 [ 13 ] Features Browse and search for products Rate and review products Purchase products Make payments and manage orders Sell products through PlayTrade e-commerce: What does it need to do/have? After looking at some popular e-commerce sites, our store obviously needs some key features. It needs the ability for users to search for and browse products, within different categories. Visitors to the site obviously need to be able to purchase these products, which leads to the need for a shopping basket to store products the visitor intends to purchase and a checkout process to manage delivery details, tax calculations, delivery charge calculations, payment processing, and of course order management for administrators. We will build upon these core features to build a basic feature list for our framework. The exception with regards to those features is eBay, which forgoes the need for a shopping basket; however, it contains provisions for watching items, automatically bidding for items, and with "Buy it now" making an instant purchase. Products We need to have the following product-related features: Finding products: We need the functionality to both browse product listings and search for products to make it easy for customers to nd products within our framework. Viewing products: Once customers have found a product that interests them, they obviously need to be able to view the product to nd out more about it. This also means we need to take into consideration what type of information is related to products (for example name, price, weight, and so on). Community-orientated aspects link in nicely here too, such as ratings and reviews. Expressing interest in a product: This can be done either by adding a product to a basket, or to an interest list, for future purchase. • • • • • • • • This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 PHP e-commerce [ 14 ] Checkout process The checkout process essentially has the following three features or requirements: Group products into orders (unless it's an auction-style site) Accept and process payment for orders, or accept a note of how payment is going to be made Take delivery details from the customer General There are also some other supplementary features the framework will need to implement: Allow the store to be administered Allow customers to manage their orders, and change account information (username, password, default delivery address) Our framework: What is it going to do? We are going to create a framework that can do anything we need it to. Of course, the exact needs of a project vary from project to project, so we will ensure it has some fundamental features, which we can then extend to whatever we need. The following features will be the minimum that we will have our framework capable of doing: Displaying and managing products Displaying and managing categories of products Embedding products, listings, and categories into other aspects of a website or web application (after all, it is a framework we are creating!) Customizing products such as apparel Searching for products Filtering the product list based on the customers' preferences, such as brand, or other properties Providing wish lists, that is, lists of products that users wish to purchase at some point, or would like someone to purchase for them (including the provision to facilitate gift purchases) Generating recommendations based on previous purchases Sending e-mail notications when certain products are in stock Publishing ratings and reviews of products • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Chapter 1 [ 15 ] Providing a shopping basket to store products and quantities of the products a customer wishes to purchase Calculating shipping cost Based on products and/or their weights Based on delivery address Based on custom rules (for example free shipping to orders over a xed amount) Tax cost calculations Managing discount codes Managing gift certicates Providing referral discounts Processing payments Allowing customers to manage their account Allowing us and other administrators to manage the store Along with these features, we are also going to look at the following functionalities: Deploying the framework into a live store environment Backing up and restoring the store Enabling secure connections to the live store using SSL To illustrate how our framework can be extended to meet the needs of any e-commerce situation, there are three appendices looking at different ways to extend the framework: Web service integration, for services such as Google Product Search Extending our store to support downloadable products Various code snippets in a cook book format, showing how to quickly extend this (and any other framework) to support some specic enhancements Our framework: Why is it going to do it? Most online stores are there for a particular purpose, either to sell a particular product, or to act as the online division of a Brick 'N Mortar store. Obviously, the point of creating a framework is to easily adapt to any purpose; however, for the purposes of this book, we are going to need a scenario site to create. • • ° ° ° • • • • • • • • • • • • • This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 PHP e-commerce [ 16 ] Juniper Theatricals Juniper Theatricals is a ctional Brick 'N Mortar novelty and theatrical supplies store based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. They have some customers who place orders over the telephone, or over fax, and have a loyal local base of customers too. When building our framework, we are going to use it as a web presence for this ctional store. Some specic requirements of the store include, in addition to previously discussed features: Customizable products: Apparel. Custom products: User-dened images and text on apparel, perhaps the ability to list these for sale as well. Virtual purchases: Electronic tickets to events. Because the store has no web presence, the framework needs to work for their entire website, integrating e-commerce functionality where appropriate. Although they are based in the UK, the website is designed to target new customers, primarily in the USA, so the site will use USD as its primary currency. Let's look at what our framework will look like for our Juniper Theatricals store. Here's an insight to a product view powered by our framework: • • • This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Chapter 1 [ 17 ] And of course, the shopping basket itself: Summary In this chapter we looked at e-commerce and discussed the reasons for creating our own e-commerce framework in PHP, along with the features our framework is going to support. We also looked at some existing e-commerce setups and discussed the different types of e-commerce stores available on the Internet. Now that we know what we are going to create and why, we are ready to start building the structure and basic functionality of our framework, before adding a wealth of e-commerce functionality. This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 . copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 PHP e-commerce [ 14 ] Checkout process The checkout process essentially has the following. copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 PHP e-commerce [ 16 ] Juniper Theatricals Juniper Theatricals is a ctional Brick. 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Chapter 1 [ 17 ] And of course, the shopping basket itself: Summary In this chapter we looked at e-commerce and discussed the reasons for creating our own e-commerce