NYCPHP Meetup

[Nate Abele]

The days of the one-size-fits-all shopping cart are dead.  What's  
needed is a toolkit which provides developers with the basic  
functionality required to implement a cart, i.e. payment processing  
libraries, interfaces to shipping APIs, customer authentication and  
order persistence.  If done right, a solution like this could allow  
developers to get up and running faster than would be possible with  
an entirely custom solution *or* a canned solution.  Not to mention  
it would be much more extensible and maintainable over the long-term.

- Nate

> Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2007 16:52:08 -0800
> From: "inforequest" <1j0lkq002 at sneakemail.com>
> Subject: Re: [nycphp-talk] Shopping cart -- revisited...again...
> To: talk at lists.nyphp.org
>
> Cliff Hirsch cliff-at-pinestream.com |nyphp dev/internal group use|  
> wrote:
>
>> Like many on here, the whole shopping cart thing is a mess to me.
>>
>> So...I just installed litecommerce, which was fairly painless. And  
>> changing
>> the templates, which use Flexy, was fairly easy. But deciphering  
>> the PHP code
>> is a nightmare. Who ever said OOP is easy? It just seems to  
>> obfuscate the
>> meaning of things. Something as simple as tracking down the origin of
>> order.details.error, which is in a template, becomes maddening.
>>
>> .....................
>>
>> I am thinking of getting X-Cart because at least it is fully open  
>> source. But
>> it’s developed by the same people, so the code may be equally  
>> confusing.
>> OSCommerce and its derivatives are out — too many bad stories. Any  
>> other
>> ideas? Is it too much to ask for a great, easy to modify cart? The  
>> cost of the
>> cart is trivial compared to the cost of the custom code, time,  
>> maintenance,
>> aggravation, etc.
>>
>> Happy holiday,
>> Cliff
>>
> I think as far as shopping carts are concerned, we are in the era of
> charge by the hour programming. That is where the money is.
>
> I also think it's time to redo the ecommerce platform. We have  
> moved far
> beyong where we were when OSCommerce was built, and far beyond  
> skinning
> (Zen cart). We don't need a new model for a shopping cart based *web
> site*, but a new model for ecommerce functions we can integrate  
> into our
> modern web sites. To me that is *not* Shopify et al., because they
> charge too much without assuming much if any of the risk in a
> transaction. A few percentage points might seem like little at first,
> but if it is cream off the top and doesn't reduce liability, it's  
> waste
> and waste needs to be eliminated. I think it is foolish to take on a
> recurring cost for design (eventhough that is a sweet deal for them).
>
> Right now every successful store I see is hand coded from scratch, and
> severely platform dependent. I don't see a lot, but I've seen a  
> dozen or
> so in 6 months.