Introduction

In this book, you will to learn to develop an e-commerce site. Electronic commerce, also known as e-commerce, involves purchasing and selling products or services through computers and smart phones using the Internet. Today, almost all businesses need an e-commerce site to sell their products or services and to show their global presence. Hence, most companies show their presence on the Internet by developing e-commerce sites. The e-commerce site that you will be learning to develop in this book will be able to sell almost anything, including books, smart phones, laptops, etc. The site will display different product categories via a drop-down menu along with a search box at the top. Users can select the products and can pay online. The site will store all the products, orders, and customer information in a database.

The book addresses newbie developers who don’t have a lot of experience developing web sites. The book teaches you how to display and sell your products and services online. It explains different database tables that will be required for keeping site and customer information. The book explains and takes you through the different stages of developing an e-commerce site. For example, you’ll learn to develop different web pages for displaying products, implement a search facility to enable customers to search for products quickly, develop drop-down menus to link different pages of the site, apply authentication checks to customers who are signing in, and associate with payment gateways to accept payments from your customers. The book will be very beneficial for developers and instructors too, who want to learn or teach web site development.

Key Topic Coverage

• Establishing a connection between PHP and MySQL server
• Using HTTP methods for transferring data among web pages
• Applying validation checks on the input forms
• Accessing products and listings and searching desired products
• Creating drop-down menus for the site
• Adding web site headers
• Session handling
• Saving product selections into a cart
• Maintaining the cart
• Supplying shipping information and making payments

A brief description of the content in different chapters of the book is as listed here:

Chapter 1, “Introduction”—In this chapter, you will learn about the benefits of doing e-commerce, that is, selling products and services on the net. You will learn how the final web pages of your e-commerce web site will appear when it’s complete. You will also learn to install the WampServer that is required for creating and testing the site. You will see the procedure needed to configure MySQL server via the phpMyAdmin software tool. Also, you will get an idea of the structure of different database tables that will be required so that your e-commerce site will work efficiently.

Chapter 2, “PHP and MySQL”—This chapter explains how the PHP and MySQL combination is used for developing an e-commerce site. You will learn the steps for writing and running your first PHP script. Also, you will learn to pass information from one PHP script to another. You will learn to display forms to get information from the user. Also, you will learn about the methods that are required in establishing connections between PHP and MySQL server. You will learn to write scripts for storing user information into database tables. You will also learn about the methods required for accessing information from the tables and eventually you’ll use that knowledge to authenticate a user, by writing a sign-in script.

Chapter 3, “Accessing the Database Using PHP”—This chapter explains the technique of accessing products from a products table and displaying them on-screen in tabular format. You will also learn to create a drop-down menu that displays different product categories and implements navigation from one page to another. You will learn to display products of specific categories, define a web site header, implement a search facility, and display detailed information of the selected product. You will also learn how session handling is done in a web site. You will learn to define the home page of your site, which will show the different product images with the fading effect.

Chapter 4, “Managing the Shopping Cart”—In this chapter, you will learn how the chosen products are saved into the cart table after keeping track of the visitor’s session ID. You will also learn to manage the cart content on the visitor’s requirement. You will also learn to display the cart count (product quantities selected in the cart) and the visitor’s sign-in status on the site’s header. You will learn to supply the shipping information, accept payments, and save the chosen products into orders and orders_details database tables.