Should I create my own shopping cart or extend an existing one?

2
votes

I am developing an eCommerce site and we already have a site which displays the list of products/stock available for purchase. If the user adds the products to his cart he will be redirected to my site. In my site I have to handling the following workflow:

  1. Shopping Cart
  2. Shippment Details
  3. Payment
  4. Order Processing.

I tried to use open source ecommerce packages like OpenCart, Magento, osCommerce, etc. But all of them have the product/catalog included in them. I don't want the product or catalog page. I only want the shipping cart page.

So I either I have to develop an ecommerce solution from scratch or tailor one of the open source ecommerce.

Would starting from scratch be better or tailoring a existing platform?

I plan to develop an open source cart using PHP (I am planning to use CodeIgniter).

1
phpe-commerceshopping-cart
Why was this down-voted? – Mike Purcell

1 Answers

0
votes

This seems pretty complex.

Personally I would do it from scratch. This seems to be too much involved for a ecommerce facility to handle unless you are comfortable editing their own PHP files.

If you do choose to use a program like magento you could disable the shopping cart, so when the user goes to pay they will be redirected to your website.

To gather all of the customer information you will have to link your database to the magento database to gather the cart & stock information. Your website will need to find out which shopping basket to use (example basket_id 0001, basket_id 0002) as you will have many baskets on your magento database.

Once the order is complete you will have to write another script from your website to change the product stock.

I hope this makes sense to you, but I would try find a system that does this.