At the end of this chapter you??™ll have a functional shopping cart, but the visitor will not
yet be able to order the products contained in it. You??™ll add this functionality in Chapter 14,
when you implement a custom checkout system that integrates with your new shopping cart.
Specifically, in this chapter you??™ll learn how to
??? Analyze the elements of a shopping cart.
??? Create the database structure that stores shopping cart records.
??? Implement the data tier, business tier, and presentation tier components of the
shopping cart.
??? Update the PayPal Add to Cart buttons you created in Chapter 9 to work with the new
shopping cart.
??? Create a shopping cart summary box to remind users of the products in their carts and
of the total amounts.
??? Implement a shopping cart administration page that allows site administrators to
delete shopping carts that weren??™t updated in a specified number of days.
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C H A P T E R 1 2
?– ?– ?–
Designing the Shopping Cart
In this chapter we will implement a custom shopping cart, which stores data in the local
tshirtshop database. This will provide you with much more flexibility than the PayPal shopping
cart, over which you have no control and which cannot be easily saved into your database for
further processing and analysis. With the custom shopping cart, when the visitor clicks the Add
to Cart button for a product, the product is still added to the visitor??™s shopping cart, but this cart
and product information will be stored directly in the tshirtshop database rather than the inaccessible
PayPal database.
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