The Great Outdoors E-Commerce Store

Posted on Tuesday, March 30th, 2021

Client	Cheryl Findlay
Professor(s)	Reginald Dyer,
Program	Computer Programming
Students	Mohamed El Sherif Melanie Belanger Sebastian Kamal Thuy Trang Nguyen Xiaojing Shang

Project Description:

She is an avid outdoor adventure enthusiast sharing her passion via telesummits. The telesummits are designed for outdoor adventure enthusiasts alike interested in sharing their experience and knowledge from traveling, outdoor activities, as well as favorite tips and products to a targeted audience with the same love for all things outdoors.
Ms. Findlay is interested in expanding her brand into the e-commerce industry creating a one stop shopping for customers alike to find all the necessary products to get started enjoying outdoor adventures.

She requested expert help to have enhancements made to her e-commerce web application. The enhancements mainly encompass major changes in terms of the general design of the application, as well as the addition of significant features to the store functionality. The team is also required to address any existing issues or lacking features that are critical to the operability of the ecommerce application and improve the security of sensitive features such as user accounts and administrative functions.

The team has updated the web application with new UI design to be more customer friendly. We also updated the web application with new features and functions including:
• Store page with all items for sale
• Product filter options to customize the items shown
• Feature to add products to the cart for purchase
• Cart page with feature to add, remove and modify items in the cart
• Checkout feature to purchase selected items. Either via a guest checkout or by creating a user account
• Payment options include PayPal and credit cards
• Customers can manage their user accounts

The e-commerce store is developed utilizing PhpStorm in tandem with the PHP Laravel framework. Laravel is a Model-View-Controller framework that streamlines the development of web applications within the PHP language. The other service we use is XAMPP service, which allows for hosting of the web application and the MySQL database schema locally on the development device currently used.
For the deployment of the website, we have migrated the database server to PostgreSQL. We also use Heroku as our cloud hosting server.