Extending the Project

We have built a fairly simple shopping cart system. There are many additions and enhancements we could make:

• In a real online store, you would need to build some kind of order tracking and fulfillment system—at the moment, there's no way to see the orders that have been placed.

• Customers want to be able to check the progress of their orders without having to contact you. We feel that it is important that a customer does not have to log in to browse. However, providing existing customers a way to authenticate themselves gives them the ability to see past orders, and gives you the ability to tie behaviors together into a profile.

• At present, the images for books have to be FTPed to the image directory and given the correct name. You could add file upload to the book insertion page to make this easier.

• You could add user login, personalization, and book recommendations; online reviews; affiliate programs; stock level checking; and so on. The possibilities are endless.