Best practices to develop a Shopping cart from scratch

Question

Hello,

I'm looking to develop a good shopping cart to my new store site. I have few ideas in my mind to start developing it...

1. It will be a stateful session bean (ejb3).
2. Object Oriented {ShoppingCart, ShoppingCartItem,ShoppingCartEvent, OrderHandler, etc.}

What I'm looking with this question, is to get, about your experience, is the best way (easier to handle) to develope a shopping cart?

It is good to be a stateful ejb? What are the common objects and its functionality (methods) that a shopping cart must have?...

Thanks, any help and suggestion will be appreciated.

Answer 1

I'm sure this is not what you want to hear, and I'll likely be downvoted for it, and it's not the answer you're looking for, but it needs to be said.

With all of the security, PCI, and legal issues surrounding an online sales model, I would strongly recommend purchasing or at least getting an open source shopping cart you can modify to building your own.

Even if you do decide to roll your own, getting an open source cart to disassemble and analyze would be a better start than anything we can answer here. This forum just isn't the right place for such a broad question.

Edit - added
I say this from experience. Our team spent quite some time just deciding whether to build or buy, and after about a month of analyzing our options, we bought a commercial cart that comes with source code, and was PABP certified out-of-the-box, which was a must have due to PCI compliance concerns.

This is not a plug for this particular shopping cart but you should look at this link at least, if you're not familiar with the requirements: http://www.aspdotnetstorefront.com/t-pabp.aspx