Shopping Cart Framework

Question

I am tasked to build a shopping cart that sells book. I would like to seek help in putting me in the right direction as to where to go from here.

As of what I see, I

Answer 1

There are many things to take into consideration here.

• What is your programming experience?
  • Have you worked with big scale web applications before? (I would say that almost all online store could be considered big scale web applications)
  • Have you worked with payment integrations?
  • Have you worked in setting up hosting environments?
• What is the budget for your project?
• Are you the only one working on the project?
• What is your client expecting from the finished product?
• When the store is online, who manages hosting, support, maintenance, etc?

Building a online store is no simple and small task. A small store with a flow like this add product to cart -> go to checkout -> pay using a third part payment provider could be accomplished quite easily and fast. But here are some more considerations:

• Shipping methods, should there be multiple ones?
• Must the site handle multiple countries, in that case you have to consider VAT, shipping again, etc.
• Payment options: Credit card, SMS, invoice, PayPal, and the list goes on.. What should be available? And this will require a good hosting environment if you wish to do direct implementations (SSL certificates, etc).
• Handling orders, returns and products in the backend
• Discount features, such as discount codes
• Being able to sell multiple products bundled as one.

I could go on for a while and make the list more and more specified, but I don't really have the time for that :) And this was just to show you that there are a lot of factors that comes in to play when building an online store.

Magento

This is an excellent choice if you are an experience developer and familiar with the Zend framework (which it's built upon). Take a look at the features for Magento, pretty much anything is possible with Magento if you know how to customize it correctly. This is not an easy task if you're not familiar with it and the learning curve is very steep.

This is a bad choice if you're not experience or the store doesn't need all of the advanced features. It's a resource hog and if you don't know your caching you will have a bad time.

Shopify

If you need to setup a online store in a hurry with a stable environment and you can settle with having the features they offer, I would say this is your best choice. Well actually I would say that at least 90% of the times, this would be the best choice.

You won't have to worry about payment implementations, backend development, support, hosting, and all the other things that comes into play.

Conclusion

I've only listed 2 options here, one advanced and one more simple on. I think you should really investigaste the different options. Take a look at their features, how much they cost, etc. Then you have to take that into consideration vs the time it will take for you to complete the store.

At least I hope I gave you some perspective on this, just let me know if you have any questions on what I wrote.