Who needs shopping carts?

rodry has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question: ⭐ (cgi programming)

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Who needs shopping carts?⭐ by BBQ (Curate) on May 09, 2000 at 09:06 UTC
I agree and disagree! :o) I agree that one can easily use the method you mentioned to maintain a stateless connection through the use of cookies, but that's a pretty simple Shopping Cart. A real Shopping Cart should be a cookie-free, stateless and still be persistent. If you should set a cookie, set it just to identify the user, and then create an empty shopping cart that he/she can add products to. This allows you to do more fancy stuff later on such as: reports on saved goods wishlists shared carts save on one machine, retreive on another just to mention a few... It all depends on the shopping model you are looking at. But as a developer, I would never consider purchasing a shopping cart. IMHO, that's a total overkill. I'd purchase a complete store, but never just the shopping cart package. Its too easy to build one yourself, and get the features you want. just my R$ 0.02 (Brazilian cents) worth.	[reply]
Re: Who needs shopping carts?⭐ by toadi (Chaplain) on May 09, 2000 at 15:25 UTC
Idem The only time I use is a cookie for identifying the user. There are more options to do with a db. If you like it or not. But most companies like to get stats(mostley the sales). Shopping has all to do with marketing. And nice graf's and charts displaying all kinds of information... And this information is also important. Off cource in some smaller cases this isn't really needed. But nontheless it's the best solution! Actually my firm is specialized in making these kind of websites. For small and large companies. We build stores, shopping-carts etc... The best is to make a custom one e.g. build one that's got a good engine and customize it for each customer.	[reply]
Re: Who needs shopping carts?⭐ by Anonymous Monk on Jun 29, 2000 at 15:46 UTC
Unfortunately a lot of people do not accept cookies (gasp) and being that they don't you would lose them as customers right off of the bat. It is hard to justify losing customers becuase you want to do it an easier way.	[reply]
Re: Who needs shopping carts?⭐ by merlyn (Sage) on Aug 27, 2000 at 15:59 UTC
Cookies are clearly not the only solution. Cookies are stripped at some security firewalls, so you'll likely break it for a legitmate user if you do that. See my post on Encrypting or Hiding Certain Info in a URL for the full list of "can" and "don'ts".	[reply]
Re: Who needs shopping carts? by Anonymous Monk on Mar 23, 2002 at 07:25 UTC
I only use a cookie if the user wants to add more than one item to the cart. On the "add to cart" button I take them straight to the cart with "check out" as the next option. Only if they want to add more items to I give out a cookie. Since most people only seem to buy one item the system rarely needs to give out cookies.	[reply]
Re: Who needs shopping carts? by sinan (Sexton) on Aug 27, 2000 at 12:03 UTC
You can create a shopping cart without using any cookies. You just have to create a user id, and have it sent over and over again with hidden inputs. As for the shopping information, put it in a DB on your hard disk. The table should have the same user id as the primary key. Sinan	[reply]
Re: Who needs shopping carts? by Anonymous Monk on Jul 28, 2002 at 05:06 UTC
its a far too simplistic view, making a good stateless yet efficient shopping cart involves using a database which has either the inherent ability to store objects like oracle or using a language like java which allows you to serialize objects and store them in databases as instances which can be retreived later. While it s not vastly difficult to do the above. some amount of design constraints are involved. like the design of the cart object. krylormaximus@hotmail.com	[reply]