Dealing with Customer Orders

Summary

We covered a lot of ground in this chapter. You implemented a system by which you can both take orders and manually administer them.

You accomplished this in two separate stages. You added a Proceed to Checkout button onto the shopping cart control to allow the visitor to order the products in the shopping cart. You implemented a simple orders administration page, where the site administrator could view and handle pending orders.

In addition, we looked at the use of validation controls and also, importantly, set the scene for entirely automating the order system.

Because order data is now stored in the database, you can create various statistics and run calculations based on the items sold. In the next chapter, you’ll learn how to implement a “Visitors who bought this also bought . . .” feature, which wouldn’t have been possible without the order data stored in the database.