Overview of this book
<p>The popularity of online shopping has increased dramatically over the past few years. There are plenty of options available if you not are planning to build your own e-commerce solution but sometimes it's better to use your own solutions. It may be easy to find an e-commerce system but when it comes to extending it or using it you might come across a lot of difficulties.<br /><br />This book will show you how to create your own PHP framework that can be extended and used with ease, particularly for e-commerce sites. Using this framework you will be able to display and manage products, customize products, create wish-lists, make recommendations to customers based on previous purchases, send email notifications when certain products are in stock, rate the products online, and much more.<br /><br />This book helps you build a Model-View-Controller style framework, which is then used to put together an e-commerce application. The framework contains template management, database management, and user authentication management. With core functionality in place, e-commerce-focused features are gradually added to the framework including products, categories, customizable products with different variations and customer input, wish-lists, recommendations, the shopping basket, and a complete order process.<br /> <br />At the end of the book, you will have an e-commerce architecture that will take you from viewing or searching for products, and adding them to your basket, through the checkout process and making payment for your order, to your order being dispatched. Focus is placed on flexibility, so that the framework can be extended as the needs of a particular store change, as illustrated by one of the appendices, which goes through the process of modifying the store to sell downloadable products, as well as physical ones.<br /><br />Supplementary information, such as how to market and promote an online store, as well as take regular backups and perform maintenance is also covered, ensuring you have every chance of success with you own e-commerce framework backed store.</p>
