I have a wordpress website, and I want to create a simple web commerce. When I mean simple, it’s really simple: Some posts/pages are going to have a custom field named “price”. These pages are going to have a link on it, and clicking on it, the user is going to be sent to a simple shopping cart. From the shopping cart, I’m going to create a checkout page, which is mainly a php page that connects to a payment gateway, showing credit cards and such. I’m going to create php files that validates info about these payments after the response from the gateway.
I’m not going to sell “products”. I don’t need postal offices, no address to deliver something, nothing. It’s just a price and a php that receives confirmation from the payment gateway. Think of selling “courses” or something like that. A receipt of the buy is going to be in the database, so the client can reference it later.
So, I think I need to create:
- A shopping cart page. This shopping cart can be made using cookies or the database. Which is the best approach?;
- A checkout page;
- A bunch of scripts to validate a response from the payment gateway;
- A simple table that stores all the payments responses, containig price, user_id and such.
Am I forgetting something? What else should I be aware of when trying to create this plugin? I heard that wordpress don’t use sessions, so I would need to create one in wordpress just for the carts. Does anyone knows about this issue?
(I don’t want to use these complete e-commerce plugins that exist since I don’t need all their features.)
I decided to use a cookie approach using $_COOKIE. The values in that cookie are a json_encoded associative array with product information, that is checked in the server with some validation. That way I don’t have to mess up with $_SESSION in wordpress that I read is problematic, and the user can have the same shopping cart even if (s)he closes the browser.
One good example of simple e-commerce application is really simple e-commerce.