I want to know how to make a basket for my website so people can buy from me. How?

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Don't you mean a webshop?

There are a few opensource (means free solutions for this).

http://phpay.sourceforge.net

is one of them.

On a side note, if you want to make one your own. I think you need to team up with other people or else it will be a too much a job to handle.

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Now creating a shopping basket or cart is fairly straightforward. You just need a way to save what products and of what quantity your customer is buying. Then of course a way to get the order to you.

There are several alternatives for saving the cart data. An effective solution would combine them.

First you could save them into cookies. Probably the easiest way to go, but not very reliable and classy.

Then you could use some sort of session based system. It would mean that a specific session id would be carried in the url or preferable in a cookie (but no other data in cookies!) and the shopping cart would be saved on the server. This is also very easy to do with the session handling properties of the current server side languages. This is how I would do it.

Then you could go for a login based system where the customer could reach his shopping cart with a password. The data would be saved in a database.



Then once you have the shopping cart, you need a way to get the order for you to process. Simplest way would probably be to email the order, again realyl easy to do with server side languges, basically a one command.


A whole other matter is payment which would require lot more time and attention to build. First of all there is the security issues. This is where I'd say you'd need to team up with experts. But if your business is relatively small, your shopping cart should have no need for an in built payment system. Basically it would just function as a way to send/input the order, nothing more.

 

 

 

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