139 - Shopping carts are hard

Changelog No live stream tonight, My internet has been super patchy today so I’m not even going to try. Unfortunately no PHP 8 short this week. It has been recorded, I just haven’t had the chance to upload and do the thumbnail yet. We documented the 7th lesson of the new PHP course. This included some TDD, some array nesting and some PHP 8 array shapes Shopping carts are hard A shopping cart needs to be frictional-less to the end user (Customer). The quicker a customer can purchase a product the better. There are many questions that need to be answered when designing the user flow of a shopping cart These are just some things to think about: Shipping Will you be shipping a physical good and if so will the shipping cost be dependent on user location? Will shipping be based on the item(s) weight? Will shipping be discounted in certain regions? Will you require shipping information to make a payment (Security checks)? Will there be discounted shipping based on quantity? Will there be a quantity limit based on different regions? Currency What currency will you be offering? What is the conversion rate? How will you track that? What are the tax implications for you versus the customer? How are you going to calculate tax? Users Will you require an actual user to login before and order is created? Can someone make a guest account? Will there be teams or individual accounts? Will you require the customer to be verified before making a purchase. Some places like Stripe require a user email address? Product Is it a digital good? Will there be stock? How will the stock be recorded/monitored? How will an out of stock product be displayed? Can products be bundled? Do bundled products get a discount? How are products removed from the cart? How are products updated on the cart? How are quantities updated on the cart? Checkout What happens when a logged out user access the checkout page? What happens to abandoned carts? What defines an abandoned cart? At what point does the cart get created in the database? At what point does the cart get associated with the user? Other items to consider Refunds Subscriptions Cancelations