“This site (http://shop.uppercasegallery.ca/) has a shopping cart the likes of which I’ve never seen before. It’s pretty slick; it slides in and persists at the bottom of the screen, unless the user closes it. With my limited knowledge of the newer technologies of the web, I’m assuming it employs JavaScript and maybe a little bit of Ajax.”

It is indeed a nice shopping cart application, but it actually uses a 3rd party provider called Shopify made by Jaded Pixel. While I don’t want to do a product review or endorsement you can set Shopify to work on your domain and even have control of the interface. They’ve even released their templating language called Liquify as open source for Ruby on Rails applications (similar to Smarty on PHP).

You have options to leverage JavaScript frameworks to build something similar such as the shop module in script.aculo.us. Many JavaScript frameworks offer a combination of drag-n-drop/Ajax that can be used to build similar functionality. Unfortunately, code samples are impractical in this example, because it varies on what framework utilized and programming language.

Adding a View Cart Link without access to the PayPal Account.

PayPal offers a simple, quick way for people to start taking payments online, instantly. The learning curve is smooth and most people get set up and start taking payments within days.

I sub-contract some freelance work on the side and one of the recent requests was to include a ‘View Cart’ Link across the footer of the website.This wasn’t a full-fledged e-commerce website, it was made up of static HTML pages that held item descriptions, images and individually generated PayPal ‘ Add to Cart ‘ buttons.

Currently the only way to get to the cart was to click the buy link and be transferred to the hosted cart at the PayPal website. The client wanted users to get to the cart directly without having to add an additional item to the cart.

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