Implementing a Shopping Cart in Laravel

Update December 2017

I started a YouTube series based off this blog post but with more features including checkout integeration with Stripe. I’m using the latest version of Laravel and will continue to add more features as the series progresses. Check it out!

Update March 2017

Upgraded to Laravel 5.4

Update December 2016

I’ve updated this demo to Laravel 5.3 as well as the latest version of the Crinsane/LaravelShoppingcart package. Have a look at the commit on GitHub for the changes. There were a few changes in the shopping cart package, but the most annoying thing was the renaming of a variable from $rowid to $rowId.

End Update December 2016

Let’s build a practical example of an e-commerce website that has shopping cart functionality. To be clear, we will be using an existing composer package that already has shopping cart functionality and building on top of that. We are not building one from scratch. I’m going to assume you have the basics of Laravel down. If not, head over to Laracasts and watch this wonderful Laravel from Scratch series.

 

Live Demo    View on GitHub

 

Choosing a Shopping Cart Package

• After some research and googling, I decided to go with the Crinsane/LaravelShoppingcart package. I found it had everything I needed, together with a simple API to work with.

• Cartalyst also has a great package appropriately named “Cart”. Check out the demo page of it in action. Note, this package is not free and part of their paid service.

• Another honourable mention is the darryldecode/laravelshoppingcart package. The API also looks very clean, and offers all the basic functionality that one would expect from a shopping cart.

Building the UI

I like to start off by styling the app. I usually make use of Laravel Elixir for front end goodies like SASS compilation, concatenation, minification, live reload, etc. However, for this demo I minimized the amount of custom CSS and just used default bootstrap styling.

The demo consists of three views:

• The shop page: resources/views/shop.blade.php
  View containing all of your products or a subset of products

• The product page: resources/views/product.blade.php
  View containing all the details of a SINGLE product

• The cart page: resources/views/cart.blade.php
  View containing the contents of your shopping cart

The Database

We need a products table to store the products in the database. Here is (a snippet of) my migration for creating the products table:

public function up()
    {
        Schema::create('products', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->increments('id');
            $table->string('name')->unique();
            $table->string('slug')->unique();
            $table->text('description');
            $table->decimal('price', 10, 2);
            $table->string('image')->unique();
            $table->timestamps();
        });
    }

Note: In an effort to keep things simple, I’m just storing the one image filename as a string. In reality, you would probably have multiple images for each product. In that case, I would create a photos table and have a one to many relationship between products and photos.

There’s also a products table seeder in database/seeds/ProductsTableSeeder.php. Usually I would use Model Factories for testing. However, since we are only dealing with a small amount of data, I just manually seeded the database.

Making Things Dynamic

At this point, the shop page and product page are hardcoded with product information. Let’s make things dynamic and pull info from our database.

The Shop Page

Let’s start off by making our Product model: php artisan make:model Product

Let’s make a partial resource route in our routes file: Route::resource('shop', 'ProductController', ['only' => ['index', 'show']]);. I named the resource shop as opposed to product because I want the URL to be something like example.com/shop/product-name.

Let’s make a Product Controller: php artisan make:controller ProductController --resource.
We’re only going to need the index and show methods for displaying all products and displaying a single product, respectively. You can delete the other ones.

Here’s what our Product Controller’s index method looks like:

public function index()
{
    $products = Product::all();
    return view('shop')->with('products', $products);       
}

And a snippet of the corresponding view in resources/views/shop.blade.php

@foreach ($products->chunk(4) as $items)
    <div class="row">
        @foreach ($items as $product)
            <div class="col-md-3">
                 // html to render a product
             </div> <!-- end col-md-3 -->
         @endforeach
    </div> <!-- end row -->
@endforeach

Note: I’m using the chunk method because a div with a class of ‘row’ has to be wrapped around every 4 products.

At this point, our shop page should now be pulling products from the database!

The Product Page

Here’s what our Product Controller’s show method looks like:

public function show($slug)
{
    $product = Product::where('slug', $slug)->firstOrFail();
    return view('product')->with('product', $product);
}

This searches our database for a slug and returns it to the view.

The view in resources/views/product.blade.php renders the appropriate information.

I’ve also added a “You May Also Like” section on the product page. This is common on a lot of e-commerce sites. To be honest, I only added it to take up more vertical space. Our implementation will just randomly pick a product that is not itself. Add the following code to your Product Controller:

public function show($slug)
{
    $product = Product::where('slug', $slug)->firstOrFail();
    $interested = Product::where('slug', '!=', $slug)->get()->random(4);

    return view('product')->with(['product' => $product, 'interested' => $interested]);
}

Render the $interested collection in the view and it should display “you may also like” products correctly!

Implementing Shopping Cart Functionality

We can now work on getting the shopping cart up and running.

Read the documentation for Crinsane/LaravelShoppingcart and follow the steps to get up and running.

Let’s make a partial resource route in our routes file: Route::resource('shop', 'CartController', ['only' => ['index', 'store', 'update', 'destroy']]);.

Let’s make a Cart Controller: php artisan make:controller CartController --resource.
We’re only going to need the index, store, update and destroy methods. You can delete the other ones.

Let’s have a look at the controller:

public function index()
{
    return view('cart');
}

The index method is responsible for showing all contents of the cart. We need the Cart contents and the Cart total price to pass to the view. I just chose to use the Cart::content() and Cart::total() facades directly within the cart.blade.php view.

public function store(Request $request)
{
    Cart::associate('Product','App')->add($request->id, $request->name, 1, $request->price);
    return redirect('cart')->withSuccessMessage('Item was added to your cart!');
}

The store method is responsible for adding items to the cart. The associate method allows you to associate a model with the cart. This way we can access our model fields directly. The request parameters are coming from a form found in the product.blade.php view.

<form action="/cart" method="POST">
  {!! csrf_field() !!}
  <input type="hidden" name="id" value="{{ $product->id }}">
  <input type="hidden" name="name" value="{{ $product->name }}">
  <input type="hidden" name="price" value="{{ $product->price }}">
  <input type="submit" class="btn btn-success btn-lg" value="Add to Cart">
</form>

 

public function destroy($id)
{
    Cart::remove($id);
    return redirect('cart')->withSuccessMessage('Item has been removed!');
}

The destroy method removes a particular item from the cart.

To update the cart quantity in the “Cart” menu item in the top right, we simply reference Cart::count in the view (in this case, it’s in the master layout: resources/views/master.blade.php

Note: For the sake of simplicity, I did not include the ability to update quantities in this demo. Typically speaking, you should be able to do this on the cart page. You would just do something like Cart::update($rowId, 2); within the update method of the Cart Controller.

I’ve now added the ability to update quantities for products in the shopping cart. On the cart page, you will see quantities are represented via a dropdown. Upon changing the quantity, an AJAX request will be sent out to update the quantity accordingly. Take a look at the update method in the Cart Controller as well as the JavaScript located in resources/views/cart.blade.php. (Yeah, I’m lazy to extract to a dedicated .js file 🙂 )

Another feature that you see on some e-commerce sites is multiple instances for shopping carts. For example, you would have your main shopping cart along with a wishlist. I’ve added this functionality as well, with the ability to move products to and from the main shopping cart and the wishlist.