E-commerce in platformOS
platformOS is fundamentally well suited for building e-commerce solutions. Initially, platformOS started out as a solution for building marketplaces, and then evolved into a flexible framework that can serve a wide variety of business needs.
E-commerce use case
Our e-commerce use case includes a tutorial series that shows you how to build a standard online shop, with product catalogue, shopping cart, orders, and everything else you might expect from a typical e-commerce experience. The use case also gives you some insight into the process of building projects on platformOS, but doesn't contain everything you need to build a project from start to finish since:
- There is no branding involved. You use an out-of-the-box version of the Bootstrap framework to get some basic styling. There is no build process, no automated tests, no performance optimization, etc. These topics are explained in separate tutorials.
- The aim of this project is to show you how to achieve certain functionality within platformOS, and not how to build the most usable or accessible e-commerce site.
Determining the project scope
Before you begin writing any code, you should determine what you want to achieve. In this scenario, your sample store will sell T-shirts.
The final solution should allow you to do the following:
As a client you should be able to:
- browse T-shirts based on a few categories you put them in (brand, type)
- apply filters to drill down to more specific results when browsing
- see price, detailed description of any T-shirt, available sizes, and uploaded photos
- add selected items to a shopping cart and perform checkout, finished with payment
- register a new account, where you can enter your billing and shipping information
- manage your shipping and billing addresses
- receive an email confirmation for your order
- browse the history of prior orders and check the status of the current ones
- receive Email Notifications whenever our order's state changes
As the shop owner/staff member you should be able to:
- manage all T-shirts - add new and edit existing ones
- update stock levels for all products
- update pricing without affecting prices of existing orders
- browse and update status of orders
- browse clients database
Example code
Find all of the files in the project's GitHub repository: GitHub - mdyd-dev/e-commerce: Sample e-commerce site powered by platformOS.
Find static HTML templates you can use as a starting point for your site in the templates folder.
Related topics
The tutorial series consists of the following topics: