Hello, I'm planning on making an online store. I know HTML and CSS to design the website, but I have no idea were to start with things like: adding items to the shopping cart, collecting billing info, and collecting shipping info. Any help would be great!
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If you've never built such a site from the ground up before, I would suggest starting with a base cms to do all of the brunt work, then designing or modifying a theme on top of it. It will be much easier in the long run.
You could start with eCommerce at the base with a CMS like LiteCommerce, or for more support, you could build a WordPress site, then integrate MarketPress, which seems to be the most popular eCommerce WordPress solution.
That stuff is out of html and css realm. They are just "glue". Dynamic functionality web pages/web applications use services(or rather applications/programs) on the server(that's why it's called a service, often called back-end, front-end is your html, css and JavaScript) side that dynamically provide content to your browser in html or other form. Html and css are actually easy stuff, unless you're out for the most awesome design, then you gotta know what you're doing. I actually don't even mention html and css in my CV, when you're doing web development like that, these are more like common sense.
I can give you some examples of languages that are widely used for this kind of development.
Java (many choices of frameworks), C# (.NET framework on windows), JavaScript (for the front end, the AJAX technology is probably the most important thing in history), PHP, Ruby(Ruby on rails), Groovy(Grails aka Groovy on rails and maybe not so widely used but nice) and Scala(know nothing about it basically).
Okay, so services usually have databases where they (as the name implies) store data in a table form usually (think of Excel). Service's job is to according to your request take data from the database, apply "business logic" to it and sent it to you, where it will be displayed.
Say you wanna make a store, you have to have all the data on your goods in the database, somebody presses a button to start checking out goods, you get how many of what goods the customer is buying, update the database accordingly, and proceed with payment stuff (I won't get into it). When for example you run out of something, the service will send the user that you have ran out of it, when he checks about it in a product page.
And I didn't get into details that much. So yeah, this stuff is difficult, don't be surprised that good web applications cost a fortune of time and money to make.
You will need more than basic experience in HTML for a web store, or any dynamic site in general.
My business decided that this would be too costly to have developed and would over-complicate our site and commerce so we decided to go the easy way out and went with a SquareUp store. On its own its alright but if you incorporate this with in-store POS and merchant services it is definitely a good option when you compare it to traditional merchant services through banks.
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