Building an E-Commerce Site Part 1: Building a Product Catalog (
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This is the first article in a three-part series dealing with using PHP 4 and MySQL to make a comprehensive e-commerce storefront solution. This article covers the product catalog database design and creating the catalog administration interface.Welcome to E-Commerce Step-by-Step. This guide is meant to show you how to
build a basic online store complete with (1) a product catalog, (2) user
accounts for customers, and (3) the ability for your customers to order products
from your catalog.
After you complete this three part series, you will
- (part 1) understand the fundamentals components of an E-Commerce site
- (part 1) learn to create a product catalog
- (part 1) learn to create maintenance screens for the product
catalog
- (part 2) learn to use the session management capabilities in PHP4
- (part 2) learn to manage users and user privileges
- (part 3) learn to display the product catalog
- (part 3) learn to allow customers to order from the product catalog
- (part 3) understand how credit card authorization and payment
works
To accomplish these goals, we will develop a fictitious store called MyMarket
that sells products over the Internet. For this we will use the freely available
Apache, MySQL, and PHP programs.
In this installment, we will cover the administrative aspects of building a
product catalog. After completing this installment, you have:
- created the MyMarket database in MySQL
- created the underlying tables for the product catalog
- created PHP scripts to add product categories
- created PHP scripts to edit product categories
- created PHP scripts to delete product categories
- created PHP scripts to add products
- created PHP scripts to edit products
- created PHP scripts to delete products
