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Answer: Who needs shopping carts?

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Q&A > CGI programming > Who needs shopping carts? contributed by BBQ

I agree and disagree! :o)

I agree that one can easily use the method you mentioned to maintain a stateless connection through the use of cookies, but that's a pretty simple Shopping Cart.

A real Shopping Cart should be a cookie-free, stateless and still be persistent. If you should set a cookie, set it just to identify the user, and then create an empty shopping cart that he/she can add products to. This allows you to do more fancy stuff later on such as:
  • reports on saved goods
  • wishlists
  • shared carts
  • save on one machine, retreive on another
just to mention a few... It all depends on the shopping model you are looking at.

But as a developer, I would never consider purchasing a shopping cart. IMHO, that's a total overkill. I'd purchase a complete store, but never just the shopping cart package. Its too easy to build one yourself, and get the features you want.

just my R$ 0.02 (Brazilian cents) worth.

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