Shopping Cart

All eCommerce implementations need to implement a shopping cart. The Wikipedia defines a shopping cart as

Shopping cart software is software used in e-commerce to assist people making purchases online, analogous to the American English term 'shopping cart'. In British English it is generally known as a shopping basket, almost exclusively shortened on websites to 'basket'.

The software allows online shopping customers to accumulate a list of items for purchase, described metaphorically as "placing items in the shopping cart". Upon checkout, the software typically calculates a total for the order, including shipping and handling (i.e. postage and packing) charges and the associated taxes, as applicable.

Although the AL-Desk Webportal, as an XML server, does not include a shopping cart directly, it does provide all the "hooks" for developers to create a deploy a shopping cart using the development scriptiong language of their choice.

Note:the AL-Desk PHP tools provide a fully functioning shopping cart.

When a user visits a website, the scripting language used on the site, will support a way to uniquely identify each user. For our discussion we will use PHP Sessions. The AL-Desk Webportal  has a call to save sessions so that returning customers can be identified.

The following is a discussion that shows how the AL-Desk Web Portal API can be used to support your shopping cart implementation.

A purchase in AL-Desk really means writing a voucher. Thus any shopping cart would translate to the als_insert_voucher.cgi call.

Users Search for Products

Users provide a date for the activity chosen

If that activity uses Blocks, then you can see if there are available seats for a given activity, date and time.

Get Client Information which may include arrival and departure dates.

Add the client to the system

Write a Voucher for a given date for that client.

Take a credit card and securely transmit the credit card information for authorization

Send an Email to the User with voucher details that you compose or send an HTML email via the als_send_email_voucher.cgi

The processing of multiple vouchers and processing them with one credit card transaction is also supported via the als_insert_voucher_payment.cgi method which additionally supports credit card authorization when used via a secure SSL Channel.

In order to process multiple vouchers with one credit card