Accepting and Processing Customer Orders

Abstract

Your new shopping cart works well, except that it doesn’t yet allow your visitors to actually place orders, which is rather troubling since that is the point of all this! We’ll deal with that issue in this chapter in two separate stages:

• 1. First we’ll implement the visitor side of the order placement mechanism. More precisely, we’ll add a Place Order button to the shopping cart page that creates a PayPal order containing the products in the shopping cart (remember, at this stage, we still don’t handle financial transactions ourselves).

• 2. Next we’ll implement a simple orders administration page, so the site administrator can view and handle pending orders.