Advice on integrating shopping cart

[samantha]

Hi

Could someone please tell me the best way to integrate a shopping cart with multiple orderlines that can be searched in CiviCRM for say the date of the order and one of the items?

I am using Joomla 2.5 with CiviCRM 4.3.7.

Thanks

[lcdweb]

there are no existing integrations with Joomla shopping cart extensions.
you'd need to work with a developer to build your connections between the two.

[samantha]

Thanks for your reply. I am a php developer and would like to know what the best way would be to implement a copy of a shopping cart in CiviCRM please.

[lcdweb]

well... you need to begin by defining your specs. "implement a copy of a shopping cart" is a bit too broad to work with.

I think the questions you need to ask are:

* how am I storing a shopping cart order in CiviCRM? will you use a contrib record, and do you just need the order total or do you need to create line items for each product as well? or will you simply provide a link to the user's data in the shopping cart extension?
* what needs to be searchable?
* what are you going to display in the contact record? will orders be listed in a separate tab, or combined with other contributions?

you need to be a lot more specific than simply "I want to integrate..."

[samantha]

Thank you very much.

* how am I storing a shopping cart order in CiviCRM? will you use a contrib record, and do you just need the order total or do you need to create line items for each product as well? or will you simply provide a link to the user's data in the shopping cart extension?

My first thought is to use the contribution record for each order but create a line item for each order line, but this could be different if I cannot get the search results required.

* what needs to be searchable?

I need to be able to search for the order item say t-shirt for a particular date or year initially and then use that in conjunction with other search criteria e.g. country, some of the queries could become very complex, but the date for an order line item is the problem at the moment.

* what are you going to display in the contact record? will orders be listed in a separate tab, or combined with other contributions?

This is up for discussion really, as the main criteria is to be able to search by date and item, as long as the orders are able to be displayed in a way that is easy to read. Whichever is the most effective and I can develop as I am new to CiviCRM development.

Thank you very much for your help.

[petednz]

it seems unlikely that shifting to Drupal would be less work than creating a shopping cart - but flagging that there has been work with integrating civicrm with both Ubercart (we are about to do a new release) and with Commerce (which i think needs upgrading for 4.4.x)

but in case in the larger scheme of things, a shift to drupal has other benefits (eg webforms) I thought I should flag this.

In our experience fwiw converting joomla to drupal sites is not a major mission but of course the real answer to that would be 'it depends' ;-)

posting this here as much for other forum viewers as for this use case