How to program a shopping cart

[CosmicCharlie]

Does anyone know a good resource for learning how to program a shopping cart for an ASP.Net website using SQL Server? Does anyone have experience doing such a thing? (I may use Access instead of SQL Server.)

I am doing a site for a small group that sells a small quantity of books and CDS, all non-profit, so the shopping cart doesn't require lots of horsepower. I want to explore the option of doing it myself before recommending they spend money on a third party tool.

AND if you recommend the third party tool route, what products do you recommend? What lessons did you learn? How did you go about integrating the tool into your website?

Some guidance would really help me.

Cosmic Charlie

 

[ca8msm]

If you wanted something already built (and you don't mind paying a small percentage for each item sold) then Paypal have a ready built shopping cart that you can plug directly into your site.


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[IT4EVR]

You may want to look at the ASP.NET E-Commerce Starter kit. This is for the Visual Studio 2005 and includes the integration of PayPal for handling credit cards. This nontrivial example will give you a lot of great ideas. You can use this as a template and extend it. The starter kits expose a lot of Microsoft "best practices".

Usually you place your cart items in session state because it remains active for only that session. For example you may add items to a CartItems collection and keep that in session state. I've also seen examples placing it in a data table.

http://pdn.paypal.com/commercestarterkit/default.htm

 

[ZmrAbdulla]

Other samples here.

http://www.asp.net/downloads/starterkits/default.aspx?tabid=62

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Zameer Abdulla
Help to find Missing people
Sharp acids corrode their own containers.

 

[oharab]

I'm using the ecommerce start kit, like IT4EVR. As well as paypal, there is a providor built in for Authorize.net, but it's extendable for any other merchant you can use online.

I've not got far with it yet, but it's very complete and VERY feature rich.

hth

Ben

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Ben O'Hara

http://www.RobotParade.co.uk

We could be confused in exactly the same way, but confusion might be like Nulls, and not comparable.

 

[CosmicCharlie]

Thank you, everyone, for your responses. This gives me much to work with, and I am sure I can get the results I need from the resources you mentioned. I am on it!

Cosmic Charlie