CSC/ECE 517 Summer 2008/wiki3 7 shopper

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Shopper pattern

Introduction

The idea of a "shopping cart" is ubiquitous in e-commerce. This idea lends itself to abstraction in the form of a Shopper pattern. Find examples and descriptions that are suitable for teaching this pattern, if possible, including some non-obvious applications. Write up your findings in the form of a narrative. Hint: You will have an easier time of searching if you exclude any pages including the terms "sewing" or "fabric"!

The Shopping Cart Pattern

The idea of a shopping cart in e-commerce comes from the physical shopping cart used in brick and mortar stores. It is used to collect and store the items that the user wants to buy. On a shopping website, the items aren't physical, so the shopping cart can do much more than it's physical counterpart. It can be used to easily add or remove items, change the quantity of an item already in the cart, and quickly total the cost of the chosen items.

The software typically interfaces with payment and inventory features of sites. In commercial packages, it is often sold as a bundle with secure payment software. The cart is usually aware of the type of inventory it collects, for instance, differentiating between physical goods (books, clothing), and services (software licenses, contract renewal fees).

It's basic design has aided countless websites since the advent of e-commerce. It's a simple concept, but when implemented well, gives a great improvement in user experience [1]

A shopping cart is useful in the following situations, from ui-patterns.com:

  • Use when the user can possibly buy more than one product.
  • Use when the user can possibly buy more than one instance of a product.
  • Use when the user may want to return later to carry on shopping
  • Use when the user may want to return at a later time to conduct payment

Some of the features of shopping carts are the ability to add and remove items, change the quantities of items, and checkout all the items it contains.

The Shopper pattern

A shopper is a user of a shopping cart, and so it makes sense that the Shopper patterns would be designed to interact with those operations. That means it is able to add and remove items from the cart, change quantities of items, and initiate checkout. It represents a user of a e-commerce site, and it's interactions with the site and the shopping cart.

According to [2], "A consumer creates a shopper object with a list of requests. The shopper traverses a set of objects and collects the requested items." The requests are items that the user wants to place it her cart. The Shopper object traverses the set of purchasable items, and collects them in the cart.


Related Links

Shopping Cart

Shopper

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