CodingForums.com - View Single Post - How to make site like Amazon

Celtboy · 02-24-2013, 01:36 AM

You have a really lofty goal and I applaud your dreams. Building a basic e-commerce site is a challenge in and of itself; you might be better off building a wordpress site with an ecommerce plugin like opencart, marketpress or shopify. They do a lot of the work already for you.
Here are some of the major areas you'll need to consider:
- user authentication
- inventory (and how to 'reserve' items, for instance if you have 3 in stock and 4 people all try and add to cart at the same time...)
- adding items to cart
- sales / coupons / discounts
- template + layout. Creating individual php files for every screen will make you crazy, and isn't very URL/SEO friendly. You'll likely want to look into a great framework such as Symfony, CakePHP, ZEND, Yii, or Laravel
- contacting users; notifications

there are probably several areas I'm leaving out, but don't make the classic new developer mistake that if you don't build all of it by hand, it isn't legit. A lot of very talented people have already encountered a lot of real world problems and built great solutions to those--it isn't cheating to build off of their success.

02-24-2013, 01:36 AM	PM User \| #3
Celtboy Regular Coder Join Date: May 2002 Location: Virginia, USA Posts: 620 Thanks: 0 Thanked 6 Times in 6 Posts	You have a really lofty goal and I applaud your dreams. Building a basic e-commerce site is a challenge in and of itself; you might be better off building a wordpress site with an ecommerce plugin like opencart, marketpress or shopify. They do a lot of the work already for you. Here are some of the major areas you'll need to consider: - user authentication - inventory (and how to 'reserve' items, for instance if you have 3 in stock and 4 people all try and add to cart at the same time...) - adding items to cart - sales / coupons / discounts - template + layout. Creating individual php files for every screen will make you crazy, and isn't very URL/SEO friendly. You'll likely want to look into a great framework such as Symfony, CakePHP, ZEND, Yii, or Laravel - contacting users; notifications there are probably several areas I'm leaving out, but don't make the classic new developer mistake that if you don't build all of it by hand, it isn't legit. A lot of very talented people have already encountered a lot of real world problems and built great solutions to those--it isn't cheating to build off of their success.