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Ajax Shopping cart?

tominated

tominated

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jul 7, 2006
1,723
0
Queensland, Australia
Does anybody know if there is like an ajax shopping cart that is compatible with e-junkie? I want to make something with script.aculo.us where when the user clicks add to cart, a div will grow and the new item will display in it with the total updating. I would need the items and total to be retained over multiple pages. BTW: it'd be uber cool if when you pressed the checkout button it made the contents of th div fade, then it resize to fite the creditcard input and everything (like the effect in system prefs). Thanks in advance. just hoping for a couple of suggestions
 
Not relevant to your question, but don't you think that's overkill usage of ajax? although it would look pretty nice, it's quite inaccessible and sorta confusing if you think about it.

I understand using ajax to update shopping cart checkout estimates without refreshing the page, or showing shipping price based on zip code or whatever...but not the whole thing.
 
Use of Ajax

I would use Ajax as the connectivity to your database, and use Javascript to control all the fancy DIV controls
 
that's the thing. I am a bit of a n00b when it comes to javascript (ok, i don't have a clue apart from script.aculo.us) so if anyone can recommend any books/tutorials or anything, that would be great too
 
The web was just starting to get accessible and then bam, along comes AJAX and messes it all up.
It looks nice but it's not very usable unfortunately.
 
well, the part that i really want is the product adding, not necessarily the payment part. I just want to add something to the new version of my website that has that 'wow' factor
 
dunc85 said:
The web was just starting to get accessible and then bam, along comes AJAX and messes it all up.
It looks nice but it's not very usable unfortunately.
Click to expand...
sorry, people weren't interested in doing this the first time around. people still promote these ridiculous fancy schmancy technologies that are completely almost inaccessible (without usually providing an alternate way to do things as well), not just ajax. i'm participating in the html working group for html5 this time around, and it's still the same stupid ideas being tossed around. people just don't give this any thought at all. What happens to the people who have javascript disabled? The people who can't read captchas (the worst invention on this planet, tbh)? The people not using the latest browsers or still using win98 (or system 7, you get the idea)? Those people on devices like cellphones and PDAs?

Thankfully some devs are realizing that accessibility is actually a good thing, so Google's got the simplified html version of what was formerly a huge amount of ajax in gmail, people are using audio captchas, people are using other methods of weeding out spammers that aren't captchas (e.g. like "what is 1+1?").

nevermind that some people wouldn't give a *&#$ about accessibility if (s)he can even get it to work (one more reason why I'd love draconian error handling in html5 :( ).
tominated said:
well, the part that i really want is the product adding, not necessarily the payment part. I just want to add something to the new version of my website that has that 'wow' factor
Click to expand...
i still think this is way too much ajax usage on your part.
 
ok, ok. I do want to make it degrade gracefully (shouldn't be too hard) and I am trying to focus on accessibility with my designs. I guess it would also be better if it just added the item to the cart, without the effects (although that would be cool).
 
To follow Janey...

Accessibility should be considered number one imho. Ajax and javascript are not inherently evil it's just how they are often implemented.

I'm all for eye candy on the web as long as it is wrapped around functionality and does not interrupt information transfer to any of it's users.

Here are a couple of resources that should help you determine whether or not you are implementing your eye candy appropriately.

http://www.webaim.org/techniques/javascript/
WebAIM's tutorial on creating accessible javascript sites. It also advises when not to use javascript for specific solutions. And on top of all that great info it instructs visitors on how they can use javascript to make a site even more accessible.

http://www.w3.org/WAI/
W3C has the dirt on all things "web accessibility". Very informative and exhaustive ((exhausting?)). Great reference. From there visitors can get all crazy strict and learn how to adhere to U.S. Gov's Section 508 compliance.

AJAX and JavaScript rich sites can be accessible and very functional, just takes a little knowledge behind implementation.
 
I think that a shopping cart is possibly the worst place you could use AJAX. What if it doesn't work with my browser? I can't buy anything off you and you just lost a customer (and my money).
 
dunc85 said:
The web was just starting to get accessible and then bam, along comes AJAX and messes it all up.
It looks nice but it's not very usable unfortunately.
Click to expand...

I worked for a guy who was the main developer on a project. My role was to do the GUI for the web apps we produced. I tried to get the guy to look at using Ajax on some of our app's and he refused. He thought having a query go out and bring back thousands of rows of data (which took minutes) was better than using Ajax and pagination and recordsets (10 or 20 at a time and a click to the next set of data) . Your name isn't Peter is it?

Back to the original question....you might want to check out the following tool some people are developing as a module to Drupal, called Übercart. I believe they're using some cool Ajax techniques to try and make the shopping experience more useful and friendly. Here's a quote from their Vision page:

"Übercart must focus on the customer experience. The cart should not be cumbersome, putting as little in the way of potential sales as possible. Products need to be easy to find, easy to examine, and easy to buy. This means product information must be organized and displayed in a way that caters to the ignorant customer and not the industry insider. It also means checkout must take as few steps as possible."

Good luck!

http://www.ubercart.org/
 
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