I have a project which will need a shopping cart which is where my confusion begins. The payment gateway we have in mind supports a lot of carts but does that mean I can’t create a custom cart myself form the ground up? We’re just selling around 10 products so I was hoping to create a customized cart for my client.
This is a PHP/MySQL site and since this is my first ecommerce project and I’m afraid that if I create a custom cart I won’t be able to link it to the gateway. Am I just being paranoid?
It depends on the gateway and how things are passed across.
In general, if the payment gateway supports multiple carts, there will be a technical way for you to link into it but you’ll need details of their API (How to pass over items, quantities, taxes, shipping info, etc…)
Worst-case, you can look at how the supported carts do it and duplicate the functionality.
The best place to look for information is the payment gateway themselves – sometimes they offer SDKs or APIs in various languages. Of course, this all assumes the payment gateway are willing to let you use a custom solution (most are)
I would point out the e-commerce is a high risk area of development and you should make absolutely certain you know what you’re doing before using it in a production environment. You need to be as certain as you can be that there are no bugs/flaws in your code that could result in over/under charging, SQL injection attacks, etc.