Product Description & Development

The project consists of building a commercial shopping cart system that is modifiable by users through their system browser. The shopping cart system is web-based software that uses Microsoft Access database and Cold Fusion scripting language. The database is keeping information about each category, subcategory, its products and users orders.

The shopping cart has capabilities of setting up your own username and password, which controls the administration pages. The administration pages also contain the owner's name, email, tax rate and state, which are used to determine shipping in subsequent pages when end user is purchasing goods.

This shopping cart is capable of uploading images and resizes them to fit nicely into the product pages. There is a product administration page, which will allow the user to modify, add or delete items. You can also change the item descriptions and prices as well as move items around and assign them to different categories and subcategories.

The categories are treated as headers and the subcategories will fall in below the categories assigned. These categories can be added, modified and deleted as well. If a category has a subcategory below it will not allowed the user to delete the category until all subcategories and products have been removed.

The shopping cart also has a shipping administration page that controls UPS, FedEx and customized rates when entered. Shipping is handled by price, weight and zip code and is calculated dependent upon the shipping type chosen at the checkout.

Hardware and software used
Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server
Cold Fusion Server 4.5/5.0
Microsoft Access 2000
Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS)

Conclusion
This shopping cart system is mainly created to fill an identified niche where e-commerce is in high demand but users want to control their own updates without always having to hire a programmer or website designer to do necessary changes.