How to integrate shopping cart system for flash application

Question

Hello.

I've built a simple flash application that takes a user's photo/image, offers various effects and filters to play with. In the end, the application can write-out the resulting image to a PDF print file (to be purchased and sent to a printer).

Currently I'm using PHP to template the web pages, with the Flash app embedded in the body of one of the pages.

I now need to integrate a shopping cart and check-out system, the idea being that the user can play with images, add various images to a shopping cart, at some point choose print sizes for each image, check-out and purchase etc. My app would attached the necessary print files, and email/submit the order to the printer.

In researching the various cart systems out there like Zen-cart, Magento, osCommerce, etc.. these all seem to be full featured CMS systems, full websites, that you deploy, customize and skin, add products to etc... a "canned store". But in my case, I'm adding/creating the product at run-time. It's not a traditional store where you browse and select items.

At first glance its not clear to me how I would use one of these systems, how to integrate with my Flash app.... it seems I only want to make use of the shopping cart, customer database portion, payment transaction features.

Is it possible to use one of these, using only the checkout and order management through a API? called from my Flash app? or processed via back-end PHP? Any suggestions, pointers?

I'm looking for some guidance, someone to point me in the right direction. I'm a noob to eCommerce.

Thank you!

Answer 1

I would just use PayPal Website Payments Standard, and have "Buy Now" buttons, or an "Add to Cart" button, which just adds the cost of each image to an array as your customers create the images. Then just set the appropriate PayPal Standard HTML variables and submit a form to PayPal. Then your customer would pay for the things on PayPal.

I'm building an eCommerce system with Flex and Rails right now (using Spree), and I can tell you it's a pretty decent undertaking. If you don't need to calculate shipping costs or taxes based on where the person lives, and you don't need to be able to have thousands of products, I'd just skip the whole eCommerce thing and use PayPal (it's free). That's what PeepCode does for example (they're a site I use to buy tutorial videos for Rails and such), you just say "add to cart", and it takes me to PayPal and I do my thing. Way easier, way less overhead. It sounds like you could do that.

If you really want to use a full featured eCommerce system, you can definitely connect to them through HTTP requests to get/post data, but that will be a long-term undertaking.

Hope that helps, Lance