Shopping carts

[Benjamin Scott]

On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 9:22 PM, Dan Jenkins <dan at rastech.com> wrote:
> Again, no customer information is
> to be stored on the server, and no login to purchase is required.

  ZenCart normally requires customer registration, but Google results
imply there's a guest-checkout sort of module/extension available.
Never tried it, myself.

> We want to retain the current ordering system indefinitely (one form per
> item and immediate payment for each purchase).

  Any particular reason?  Buying a single item is usually just treated
as a degenerate case of buying multiple items.  I know I've seen sites
with a "Add to cart and checkout now" sort of button (in addition to
the "Add to cart" button), which would seem to be much the same thing.

  You're free to do whatever you want, of course; I'm just thinking
the less integration work you have to do, the better.

> We do not want to perform credit card approval through the shopping cart
> for several reasons.

  Sure, sure.  It's not uncommon for a commerce operator to process
payments offline.  Some of my experience with Zen Cart was with a
wholesaler who wanted their customers (the retailers) to have a
catalog they could pick from, and build a shopping cart of stuff they
wanted to order, but payment (including shipping fees) was the domain
of reseller agreements, with invoicing, consignment options, etc.  So
I had to write dummy payment and shipping modules that didn't do
*anything*.  Prolly the easiest programming I've ever done.  :)

> So, the goal of the shopping cart is simply to
> aggregate multiple orders into a single order settlement. It does seem
> like a fairly simple task, however, none of the carts I've examined
> appear to handle this scenario.

  To me, it seems like, if you have an existing catalog and checkout
in place, and you want to keep them, building the cart software
yourself would be easier than trying to adapt an existing system onto
your code.  Store a list of product IDs in a cookie.  When the user
clicks "Add to cart", add the current product ID to the cookie.  When
the user clicks "Checkout", iterate over those IDs and call your
existing checkout for each.  Yes, this is code you have to maintain,
but you'd have to do just about the same amount of work to call out to
something else.  The only thing that you wouldn't have to write
yourself otherwise would be the code to list the contents of the card
for the user to review.  Is generating an HTML table really that big a
deal?  :-)

  But hey, if you want, grab a copy of ZenCart and start hacking out
anything that's not the cart code.  :)

-- Ben