Shopping cart

daithisean

I'm not a webdesigner but I've designed a site using Coffee Cup visual site designer. I'm selling a single item and I want to insert a very basic shopping cart (select amount of item and select destination to calcualte postage). Its going to redirect to Realex to authorise payment. Any advice?

Eoin

If you do this yourself (i.e. don't use an eCommerce package), then it might be something like this:

A form with:
Quantity field
Shipping zone (e.g. Ireland & UK / Europe / Rest of World) - easiest way to do the shipping cost
Name, Email, Shipping address etc.

You will also need to generate an order number, and your encoded merchant ID to realex. They provide code samples for this.

The form will be submitted to Realex - and along with the mandatory fields they need to fulfil the payment, they can also accept custom ones. They will then send these form field values back to you at the end of the process so you can process them accordingly.

You will have to consider the following:
1) How will you process the order when it gets back to you? Will you store the details somewhere?
2) What happens if a customer doesn't click the "return" button to bring you back to your site? The payment will have gone through, but you won't have captured the details. Do you write to a database before and after?

An eCommerce site is probably going to be overkill for one product, but you should check out the realex site and see what carts they support - they might have some cut down ones that might suit.