Preserved Topic: Perl shopping cart

Next week I am presenting a proposal to a prospective client who would like some work done involving a shopping cart. Since the proposal will involve my best estimates for how long the project will take (thus relating to my fee), I need to know more about the work involved with shopping cart scripts. I am familiar with Perl, and have experience using readme files, but have never worked with shopping carts.

1) With this in mind, how long do you think it would take for me to download a script from, say, Matts Scripting Archives, follow the readme file, and incorporate the script with the website? Most of the website work will involve html tables and javascript- which I have a firm idea of how long it will take. But the shopping cart portion I need help with. I just need to know your best estimate of how long it will take to incorporate the shopping cart script with my client's website.

2) Can you recommend any other good sites that offer free shopping cart scripts? Is Perl the best option?

Thanks so much!
CRO8

http://www.hotscripts.com/Perl/Scripts_and_Programs/E-Commerce/Shopping_Carts/

You have to like SO check out Perlshop.
They have a very active mailing list, it's free, and they have working examples with a lot of different payment servers -

that's a good question - who is your payment server? CSI, FNBO, VisaNet?
I happen to have some very good (and weird) experience in this arena - if you
want to talk offline, drop me a line.

edit:
CSI (Card services Int'l) has an "end-to-end" solution in Perl.
Intershop is kickin' butt in e-commerce, but they are $expensive$.. if you're
expecting a lot of payments (100/hour), I would avoid Perl/ASP and go to Java/EJB's
with a WebLogic/Linux server - problems there, too (most JVM's leak memory
like a sum-bitch).

Good Luck.




[This message has been edited by kevincar (edited 05-24-2001).]

Ya, shopping carts are easy, checkout counters are hard!

A little out of date, but here's a case study: http://www.arsdigita.com/books/panda/ecommerce

I'm using PHPshop. since I'm partial to that language. (Also it's a little intensive)

Great aricle here

Finally many hosting commerce accounts come with some soultions built in Dreamhost has something claled Miva Merchant built in.

And just to give you a heads up linear is right the cart is easy (thats just the basket) It's checking out that's a pain in the ass.

Finally you may want to check out the Yahoo stores solution.


Walking the Earth like Kane

[This message has been edited by bitdamaged (edited 05-25-2001).]

Cool. Thanks kids. I will follow up on the links you suggested and let you know how it turns out.

Thanks.
CRO8