Online Shopping Cart - Introduction

The Internet is a sort of border-less global gateway for commerce. Anyone can buy anything from any vendor in the world. Any primer on Web Development is incomplete without a section on online buying and selling, also referred to as e-commerce. Just about every large store and franchise allows users to order and purchase online. Although goods cannot be stolen from an Internet store, online commerce has caused an explosion in the amount of sensitive information such as credit card numbers, bank account numbers and TPIN numbers flying around the Web. This information is always vulnerable to the attacks of unscrupulous hackers who try their best to capitalize on weak passwords, unguarded databases and inadequately secured sites.

Entire books have been written on the distinct subjects of online vending and web security. These two subjects are related only because a site's security becomes more important once it sees a lot of traffic containing sensitive information like credit card details and passwords. So, security is an issue that sort of rides on the heels of adding commercial functions to a site and making it the repository of valuable information. We will use this rationale to hook up two divergent tasks in this chapter. The first task consists of devising an elementary shopping cart application that keeps track of customer's selections and places orders on the florist site. Putting in place a basic digital signature type system that secures user's password information every time they login in constitutes the second task. The first task will give us an idea about how vendors implement ordering mechanisms on their sites; the second will touch on the vast topic of online security.