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Ecommerce Development Plan

Posted: Fri Jun 12, 2009 4:13 pm
by luke4868
Hey, Im about to start a rather long process of creating an entire Ecommerce site from scratch (bearing in mind this is also a very big php/mysql lesson for me too) and I'm looking for some ideas, suggestions and critisism about how I'm going to go about completed this.

Here is my plan so far

Front End

Products Pages - The front end of the site will have the design and a page for each category, ie. Mens Clothing, Womans Clothing etc. Within each of these pages ideally would be a simple template type system, were it will call the database for the product ID etc.

In terms of displaying these products it would be an image, description, name etc all called from the database. Im unsure how to go about doing this, would I do a separate piece of code for each product or is there an easier way of doing so?

Front end calculations - I'm wondering how I go about creating a 'more you order, more discount you get' on a range by range or product by product basis. Is this easy to do? because when i think about it, i cant think of a way its done.

Shopping Cart - How the hell are these made? This is the thing that has thrown me off course for the front end, Are they cookie based, session based? stored in the database? I honestly have no idea, an uneducated guess is in a cookie, but im unsure.

Back End

Pending Payment/Packing/Despatch system - This easiest way i can think of doing this is all orders get submitted to pending payment, where the are processed manually by a credit card terminal or sent to an online gateway. Once cleared they are submitted to pending packing, were the products are ticked off or backordered, once all is ticked/backordered it will give the option to generate the Invoice/Packing List/Delivery Note/Backorder Sheet. Once completed you would submit it to pending despatch. Were you would enter the tracking information and it would send an email to the customer.

Stock Control - Are these complicated to build? I dont know whether to simply leave it out and bring it in the future when business is increased, or do it now.

Invoices, Packing Slips, etc - These would be shown as PDF's and as far as i know it isnt very hard to convert a html/php file into a .PDF ive seen a few different packages out there that can handle this server side.

Customer History/Add Customer - This is easy and I have already built most of this, however how would I go about creating an order history, im assuming it would have to be stored in a database, but how is the best way of approaching this? I dont want to create a system to find that i cant keep history because of ive dont the wrong thing such as storing orders in a database, cookie etc.

Transaction List - The easiest way i can think of doing this is by getting each order to submit it's grand total to a table were the transaction list pulls it and add its all together to form a daily total, which can be saved and stored so there can be a full transaction list for any date that is stored.

I think that is it for now, But all help with this would be appreciated on all levels. Anything to give me a better idea of doing things to make my life easier would be good.

Thanks (one hell of a lot), Luke.