This chapter aimed to cover the broad topic area surrounding customers and their orders. This is a very large concern and begins to tread into a much larger subject known as Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The e-commerce tools we built in this chapter included:
Simple customer account creation and profile components
A system for taking and tracking orders
Implementation of a custom shopping cart
Integration of our custom cart with the Google Checkout XML API
Very basic customer product review and feedback functions
In the next chapter we will discuss the order payment processing mechanism in more depth, including building a generic framework to process payments from vendors other than Google Checkout. Later on in the book we will revisit the order and customer models we created here to add additional features, such as coupon codes and customer discounts.