Shopping cart - build or buy?

Hi,
I need a shopping cart put into our website. I see that there are many.Net shopping cart products available. But I feel like its no big dealto implement a shopping cart, using datagrid, sessions, tables. Andimplement functions for adding/updating/deleting items to the cart. AmI missing anything, is there anything else I need to take care of? Oris it wise to buy one of those products?
Thanks.

I think this really comes down to personal preference and the matter of whether you are wanting to put the time and effort into building one from scratch. If you have a tight deadline a purchased solution may speed things up for you. I would say your are not missing anyting at all only other thing you need to worry about is storing the information using Sessions but this again is a very very simple thing to do.
My personal preference is to create my own 95% of the time to give me a bit more flexibillity along the way.
Good luck with whatever you decide to do :D !
Kind Regards,
Jon Sharratt

I used the e-commerce starter kit from this site - customized to how I needed it to work - check it outhere
HTH

At first, I was intimidated about the fact of building my own shopping cart on my clients sites. But I stumbled across this article on sitepoint.com recently.
Click here to visit
It is designed to work on one page but with a little work you can design it to work across multiple pages with the help of ASP.NET SessionState.

The book "Beginning ASP.NET 1.1 E-Commerce from Novice to Professional" (ISBN 1-59059-254-9) gives a great build from scratch shopping cart system. The entire book is basically a tutorial on building an e-commerce site. It's straight forward, assumes you have .NET programming experience and the code works.
I'm not the author, publisher or anything of the sort but just a new programmer to the .NET arena and found the book to be useful and I think it will help you determine whether you want to code the shopping cart yourself.
I am also looking to build a shopping cart for my company website... I have bought this book on Amazon. Do you know if the examples are in VB?
Yes, the book is written completely in VB.NET. You may have found that our already.

Yeah... I got the book the other day and I have read a few chapters. Not only does this book provide useful examples for the full range of E-commerce related features it is also a great resource for individuals who are looking to start using VS.NET. I personnaly have been using .NET for one year now and I am currently making the transition from Dreamweaver to VS.NET, I would definately recommend it to people who are starting out in .NET or trying to get to grips with using VS.NET.

Hi All,

First a note on the book on Buidling an E-Commerce site, the book as two shortcomings: 1) Its completely in VB.NET and there is no C# equivalent, 2) The book only helps you build a very basic cart, it does nothing for those shops there there might be multiple options associated with a product. This is a feature that should be a must discussion in the books since its a very widely implemented feature and this feature actually digs into the real capabilities of .NET.

I haven't bought any solution online for e-commerce because for some reason all my clients have the weirdest requests that none of the apps can fulfill out of the box. Therefore I have ended up creating three different carts to meet each clients request individually.

Sincerely,

Mansoor.

new2aspdotnet wrote:

Hi,
I need a shopping cart put into our website. I see that there are many .Net shopping cart products available. But I feel like its no big deal to implement a shopping cart, using datagrid, sessions, tables. And implement functions for adding/updating/deleting items to the cart. Am I missing anything, is there anything else I need to take care of? Or is it wise to buy one of those products?
Thanks.

If you build your cart yourself, one issue might come up is allowing annonymous users to have their cart.
Assume that I am registered user but I am not logged on right now. Previously I added some items to my cart but I never checked out.
So my cart have some items in it (assuming that you save the cart into database). I logged out and now I just again went to your site
and added few items without logging in. Now when I want to check out, you need to merge the annonymously added items to the existing cart items and update the cart accordingly.
Does it makes sense the scenario I just said. This problem might appear if you persist your cart for certain time.
Hope it was helpfull.
I found a book about 1.5 to 2 years ago called "ASP.NET E-Commerce Programming".
I purchased the book in the "Event" that I would need to write some kind of code for e-commerce. This book is the C# version.
It delves into a lot of issues, and covers just about everything but order fulfillment and payment processing. Apparently the interface is set up so that it can be integrated into commercial applications.
I have not been able to find code examples and haven't had time to actually code the project based on the book (its not "huge", 'bout 350 pages or so, including index), but the code looks well thought out, does it work?? NFI.
The ISBN = 1-86100-803-1 and is published by Wrox. I have no idea if the book is still in print, but if you look you should be able to find it used.
I've sent emails to the email address indicated on the inside cover but it was bounced back because of multiple recipients or something like that.
Hope it helps.
Frank

Hello,

I recommend you to buy a shopping cart because of maintenance difficulties, upgrade problems, payment and carrier services.

I offer Quick Shopping Cart option of

www.GeneralDots.com

where you can find all of your needs aout a shopping cart.

Regards,

There are other things like payment and accounting transactions to take care of as well as integration into shipping web sites for tracking and shipping costs. These can also be built, but is definitely easier to get something off the shelf.