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I was recently asked to create a "quick and simple" shopping cart solution for a client that needed to be able to fulfill orders quickly, but didn't want to wait for our normal site development timeline.  What follows are th accounts to implementing as "quick and easy shopping cart".

I was recently asked to create a "quick and simple" shopping cart solution for a client that needed to be able to fulfill orders quickly, but didn't want to wait for our normal site development timeline.  (We're swamped right now and this put the clients site complete time out at least 90 days).

So to get the contract and to allow the client to contiue business as usual, our sales people basically told them that we would complete a quick and easy site to hold them over until we are able to fully develop their main website.

 When given the project I didn't think much of it.  How hard could it be to get a quick and easy one page shopping cart up and running?  Not as easy as I thought.

The server was in a lamp enviroment, so naturally I decided PHP would be the best solution.  I had orignally planned to build everything myself, using javascript on the client side to validate the fields and then PHP on the server side to do the calculations and submit the order.  But since I was on a pretty tight timerame (less than a week) I decided that it might be eaiser to just use an existing shopping cart soltion to handle all of the cart functions rather than take the time to build them out myself. I quickly found that most shopping carts where just to bloated to do what I needed.  I wanted something quick and easy to setup without all of the backend features getting in the way.  I also decided that I didn't want to mess with working with a database since the site would not contain very many products or pages.

I decided to start looking at some javascript options.  I came across....NOP Cart which did exactly what I needed.

It took only a matter of hours to setup and customize the cart.  It even allowed for shipping tax charges to be passed to the cart based on the product.

Within a couple of days I had a complete online store up and running using a javascript shopping cart.

The client was happy, and I didn't have a break my back to get the project complete.

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