Simple PHP Shopping Cart

In this tutorial, we are demonstrating how to make a simple PHP shopping cart tutorial step by step. This shopping cart application wrote as very minimal and simple for learning purpose. One can take this as an easy shopping cart for any website, but this is purely an idea to create a shopping cart website. More complex websites need a lot of other things like payment gateways, shipping methods, etc. This tutorial will give step by step approach  to build a shopping cart with PHP and mysql.

Do not use this directly in the production system without making necessary security approaches. This example has a certain number of products, displaying from the database.

We can add each and every product to cart. With help of session, products are storing in the cart. So cart will be empty when we clear the session.

How does PHP Shopping Cart work?

Products listing

First, we are creating the product catalog listing grid. We have all our products in the database with name, price, and SKU. In the below listing we are getting products from the database and iterate using a foreach loop.  Just remember this PHP shopping cart tutorial using sessions to store the user selected product details.

Each product has an add to cart button in order to add the product into session cart.

Adding product to shopping cart

When the user presses the Add to Cart button the product details saving into the cart session with SKU and other details. The following code has the action add to cart and it adds the product to shopping cart session.
If we click on the same product several time, the quantity will be incremented.

Removing one or empty all from cart

We allow users to individually remove the item from the cart by pressing the button Delete. Either they can press Empty Cart button to delete all products in one go.

WE use unset() function in php to delete the session form cart.

You can download the simple shopping cart in php source code by clicking the below download button

Note: When you learn how to write simple ecommerce shopping cart with php and mysql, give a try to  ecommerce content management systems such as Magento , Open Cart    .They are some of the best shopping cart solutions out there in the open source world.

Hope you have enjoyed the article about how to build a shopping cart website in simple PHP, please don’t hesitate to share with your friends.