PHP 5 e-commerce Development- P7 ppt

Chapter 1
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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:
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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