Building an E-Commerce Site Part 1: Building a Product Catalog

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