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E-Commerce with Django

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As the year draws to a close, I find myself once again looking at my year long "To Do" list and see a bunch of projects that never got done. Why they didn't get done is anyone's guess. My personal guess would be that I got to busy with clients and never got around to all the personal projects.

One project that I did come across that I think is more than just a personal fun project, is the E-Commerce engine I wanted to build for my T-Shirt site. Currently, my site consists of one lonely entry in a blog and that's about it. No style, no content, and certainly no shirts to sell. In the past I had let Paypal and Google Checkout do all of the order processing for me. I think the site needs a store to go along with the blog and now is an excellent time to talk about building E-Commerce into Django.

One of the major reasons that I want to build a shopping cart on my site, is so I have customer orders and information all in one place. Storing that information with Paypal isn't all that bad, however it is one extra step that I'd rather not take. I really want the contact information and ordering information on the same system, so that I can use that in "salesy" type of way.

Currently I can't take what someone else ordered and match that to other products. Basically I need the ability to cross sell, which with Paypal or Google Checkout, it isn't that easy. I'd also like customers to log into the site so that they can get special discounts and information that the normal web surfer won't be able to get.

I get lots of shirts and designs, and sometimes I print a few extra to give away. If I have ordering information from someone and I have the ability to see how a customer has ordered in the past, then I might just feel like sending that person a free shirt for being a good patron.

So over the next few posts I intend to document the process (thought and development) that I'm using to build this website. There should be a mix of things to come, both from a design perspective and a data modeling perspective. It should be a fun working tutorial that will build on something real.

As always I enjoy your feedback.

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