E-Commerce HELP! [Archive]

birdboy0103

January 24th, 2005, 06:20 PM

Hi, I've got a Mediatemple server, and I'd like to create a site that uses E-commerce.

Basically, I only know how to do things within flash, I dont know how to get flash to interact with PHP, I need to learn how to use mySQL, but I dont know where.

Could anyone list some good tutorials?

Thanks very much

lunatic

January 24th, 2005, 06:33 PM

kirupa.com --> tutorials will get you started with php at the very least. Also check some of the stickys for tutorials and resources - there are some that are very specific php and/or sql

:hr:

GreenLantern

January 24th, 2005, 06:41 PM

How does one use E-commerce?

lunatic

January 24th, 2005, 06:41 PM

shopping cart stuff i think is what birdyboy is referring to.

:hr:

GreenLantern

January 24th, 2005, 06:42 PM

Yes, but you don't actually use it.

lunatic

January 24th, 2005, 06:53 PM

huh? what do you mean? I think birdboy wants to build a site that can sell things securely. That people can buy things off the site.

:hr:

GreenLantern

January 24th, 2005, 06:58 PM

Yes, but it doesn't use e-commerce, it is e-commerce.

lunatic

January 24th, 2005, 07:00 PM

sheesh, who died and made you semantics king? :beam:

just kidding - but do you want to expand on this thought at length and help our poor friend out? maybe give him some pointers or leads or tell him where to go to start looking at how to incorporate selling stuff into his site?

:hr:

*edit* assuming that birdboy is a guy

GreenLantern

January 24th, 2005, 07:04 PM

Oh, why not.

birdboy, this page has taught me everything that I know about PHP, mySQL, and Flash:
http://www.kirupa.com/web/index.htm

CyanBlue

January 24th, 2005, 07:42 PM

Geez... Why don't we just get rid of the all the forum areas and redirect the traffic to the Kirupa tutorial sections??? :D

GreenLantern

January 24th, 2005, 07:43 PM

What would you suggest for this guy? I mean where do you start with something like that?

CyanBlue

January 24th, 2005, 07:45 PM

Um... I was just joking... :disco:

lunatic

January 24th, 2005, 07:47 PM

The tutorials are VERY good. And one of these weekends I'm even going to go through them :P

BUT - there aren't any tutorials on kirupa so far about how to set up an e-commerce site. :(

Anyone got any suggestions?

:hr:

birdboy0103

January 24th, 2005, 11:19 PM

lunatic: *edit* assuming that birdboy is a guy

uhh....I doubt many woman would pick a name like birdboy...not to mention, I havent seen any women that like computers...or birds, for that matter.

birdboy0103

January 24th, 2005, 11:21 PM

well, look, the whole e-commerce thing I'm trying to make allows everything to be really simple. Basically, when someone new buys something off my site, they enter all their info into my database, and create a user id and junk. From then on, people could see a list of what they bought, when, etc. It'd becaome a sort of "click n' buy" thing...y'know, like amazon.com has

lunatic

January 25th, 2005, 01:13 AM

uhh....I doubt many woman would pick a name like birdboy...not to mention, I havent seen any women that like computers...or birds, for that matter.

well, I'M a woman, as is kitiara, hifycopymaster, redgolgi, rere and several others. And we all happen to like computers. And some are downright brilliant at it. So I try not to make assumptions about anybody's username around here. ;)

terlan

January 25th, 2005, 11:08 AM

http://www.phpbuilder.com/ is quite a good resource for php and linking it to mySQL.

I'd recommend downloading oscommerce. ( http://www.oscommerce.com)
Then have a good study of it's source to see how a large scale ecommerce system is put together. its free, open source and might save you coding.

Then browsing the user made contributions to see if / how others connected it to flash, adapt or learn from it.

Don't reinvent the wheel unless you have to.
Another thought
If you aren't too familiar with ecommerce, get somone who IS to code for you. This is peoples money you'll be dealing with, a ill designed ecom system is open to all sorts of abuse. Users changing order values & details etc are all too common these days.

That said, ecom systems are fun to design from a code point of view (if your into that sort of thing). For some REALLY serious reading on the subject try
http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/
&
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/6-171Fall2003/CourseHome/index.htm
which are MIT's opencourseware on the subject.

lunatic

January 25th, 2005, 11:09 AM

wow terlan your first post on this forum was to help someone else out with some really good advice and good links. thank you and welcome to the forums! :thumb:

January 25th, 2005, 11:51 AM

uhh....I doubt many woman would pick a name like birdboy...not to mention, I havent seen any women that like computers...or birds, for that matter.

Theres this really fit girl on my computer science course :) just thuinking about her............drool........:)

Anyway e-commerce to make your own (presume you are talking about making everything from scratch) would require you to be fluent in a server-side language which is gained from doing as many tutorials/experiments etc as you can, then the database bit mySQL if you are using PHP again do tutorials etc and then you really want to study how to exploit certain services like mySQL queries and find limitations of certain features e.g. how secure is SSL?

P.S. amazon is brobably built on one of the most powerful databases etc out there same with ebay in fact I think ebay now uses Java :)

sorry to break it to you but you first need to go through the learning curve everyone else does...at least to promise customers there details are secure, just coz info is in a database doesn't mean its safe :)

birdboy0103

January 25th, 2005, 10:07 PM

to: all readers of this post:

I didnt mean any offense when I said
I havent seen any women that like computers, I havent met any girls my age (16) that like computers, and if there are, I'd sure like to meet them.

Again, I'm sorry, I should have been more clear... :cowboy:

birdboy0103

January 25th, 2005, 10:20 PM

BTW, yeah, I wanted to go through the learning curve, but I couldnt find any good places that would do flash & php. I wasnt just gonna use someones work and pound it together, obviously, its gonna have bugs. Jeez, I have a lot to learn, I only know somewhat intermediate actionscript and stuff, and here I am, trying to make a flash powered operating system...lol.

lunatic

January 26th, 2005, 11:20 AM

no offense taken, and welcome to the best place to learn anything flash (IMO) :pleased:

CyanBlue

January 26th, 2005, 11:46 AM

I dont' agree with that 'the best place' statement, but I do agree with lunatic that there are very talented people in this forum... :)
(Just to clarify... I am not trying to say which one is better and which one is not... I just don't think there is 'the best place' on the Internet... That's all... ;))

lunatic

January 26th, 2005, 11:47 AM

Well of course not silly, I'm just biased because the people here are so friendly and knowledgeable and if they know a better place they'll send you to it. See terlans post for example.

:hr:

CyanBlue

January 26th, 2005, 12:09 PM

Hehe... I was just teasing you... ;)

lunatic

January 26th, 2005, 12:18 PM

I like being teased. ;)

GreenLantern

January 26th, 2005, 02:05 PM

How e-commerce is related to females and computers by kirupa forums.

:lol:

lunatic

January 26th, 2005, 02:36 PM

Well obviously birdboy wants to buy and sell brainless girls through his website. :beam:

GreenLantern

January 26th, 2005, 02:45 PM

hmmmm how much? :beam:

intrudah

January 26th, 2005, 03:12 PM

Being new to php/mysql is not a good idea when starting on online company. I can tell you from experiance it's not easy, you need to stay on top of security and thats not easy for new programmers.

Also I suggest reading a book on web usability, its helped so much in attracting customers and making the site easy to use.
Hope that helps :)

Sammo

January 26th, 2005, 03:13 PM

Well obviously birdboy wants to buy and sell brainless girls through his website. :beam:

How much would the postage and packaging be to get to England, pronto? :P

CyanBlue

January 26th, 2005, 03:33 PM

Geez... You guys are cracking up... :hugegrin:

Sammo

January 26th, 2005, 05:56 PM

On a more serious note (although i'm still interested in lunatic ariving in my letterbox :P) //

www.tutorialized.com have lots of PHP tutes, I know some of them are e-commerce related. Not sure about integrating it into flash though.

lunatic

January 26th, 2005, 08:02 PM

CyanBlue

January 26th, 2005, 08:11 PM

Oops... Everybody run away... :luigi:

Sammo

January 27th, 2005, 03:36 PM

Wait a minute wait a minute you under-sexed over-stimulated overloaded-with-hormone fiends! I never said anything about ME being available through birdboys website! :P

now wait a sec, who says I'm a brainless girl? :m:

Oooh! :(

Not even available for special request?

And being unbrainless is just an advantage!

CyanBlue

January 27th, 2005, 03:58 PM

"unbrainless"??? Is that an English??? ;P

lunatic

January 27th, 2005, 04:14 PM

an English? an English what?

:run:

Sammo

January 27th, 2005, 04:21 PM

lol, I don't think it is an English, hence the italics :)

// btw lunatic, love the footer!

lunatic

January 27th, 2005, 04:36 PM

thanks! it was fun to make :D

Sammo

January 31st, 2005, 06:12 PM

Yeah, it rules :P But you should set the _quality to low for that nice pixel effect (and no bluring).

Hobbes looks soo cool with Strongbads body :D
// edit, lol simple thing, simple mind :)

dfhdesign

February 10th, 2005, 04:31 PM

You can purchase digiShop (e-commerce solution) for $350, they will help you with the install, make sure you have SSL set up through your host for secure transactions, and it helps to have a database set up through your host as well. Lunarpages.com is a good option.
After they install, take their template files and integrate them into the "look and feel" of your site. It's pretty easy to control (CSS) once it's actually set up on your server.
Here's the link:
http://digishop.digisoft77.com/
Good luck

CyanBlue

February 10th, 2005, 06:34 PM

Hm... digiShop looks very interesting... Thanks... :)

salvador marley

February 15th, 2005, 04:09 PM

so once digishop has been purchased, who uses the software - me who designs the site or my client who is selling his stuff?

Sorry to sound stupid, its the only thing i'm good at.

cyanblue - did you use it?

Thanks

birdboy0103

February 15th, 2005, 05:17 PM

Well, see, I've got mediatemple, so I guess I'll just use miva or something. Thanks anyhow...

CyanBlue

February 15th, 2005, 05:27 PM

Nope, I did not... Love to hear some thoughts from the people who has used it... :)

imbuez

February 16th, 2005, 03:38 AM

Sorry to lead the traffic away from good 'ol kirupa but what are you looking for may be found on sepy's site http://www.sephiroth.it/tutorials/flashPHP/catalog/

Thios particular tutorial guides you through setting up an online catalog in flash, worth a glance maybe ...

salvador marley

February 16th, 2005, 02:31 PM

thanks imbuez. My next task actually is to learn how to use a database - never used one before. I've read they are very complex things so i'm not looking forwrd to it.

Cheers.

lunatic

February 16th, 2005, 02:32 PM

What kind of database? Not to tout Micro$oft but Access is pretty good if you have it and isn't too hard to learn.

:hr:

salvador marley

February 16th, 2005, 02:36 PM

well lunatic - i have just got a book that deals with dreamweaver - php and sql - so i guess the sql database. I've flipped through the book and it looks as though even carl sagan would have difficulty understanding it - if he was still alive that is.

lunatic

February 16th, 2005, 02:42 PM

Well I don't know anything about php - I use ColdFusion (and am a beginner) to talk to a sqlserver database. It's not the easiest thing in the world but I believe the tutorials on kirupa are quite good!

http://kirupa.com/web/index.htm

:hr: