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Catalog and Shopping Cart....What's the best way?

I want to make a site about car parts, but as you can imagine, there's a lot of stuff that only applies to certain models/years of cars. I thought about making a database to easily sort through it based on various things. I know Access, but would be willing to try MySQL if it's better. Would I just list everything in a table, so I could have a wheel table, stereo table, and so on. In each table, I would have the ID, part number, brand, vehical and years it fits on, and a description of the product. Have a script that makes a list of the products and when you clcik on one, a new page is created using the database info? Also, what about the shopping cart after the pick the parts they want? I've used flat text files before, but should I also make a database for that, too, or is it overkill?

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robognome

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cvsherri

personaly im done reinventing the wheel on this subject, I just bought a developers license to VP-ASP. Well worth it when you look at all of the value adds :)

JohnHei1977419508

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Does osCommerce let me add products? If it doesn't, then I would need to make my own database, and then tie the shopping cart to it. If it does let me add products, that seems really easy and I'll just go with that.

robognome

Yes, OsCommerse also provides a "storefront" and maintains a complete catalog. If you need it to, it will track inventory levels. It can also be localized for tax computations and other additional fees (shipping) will also maintain a list of customers that have used your site (from the info they enter).

To do all this it requires its own mysql database and has a very extensive administrative interface.

In short, it can provide a significant portion of an ecommerse site.

See: http://www.oscommerce.com/