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wow, thanks Matt. This is the answer i have been waiting for. this is my misunderstanding. i get it now, it's not that a basic shopping cart isn't trivial, it's that it quickly expands to a full time job. thanks for enumerating specifics.
ah, ok, this make sense. So, the ecommerce programmer would write all of the catalog stuff, then hand it over to a 3rd party shopping cart for payment, coupons, taxes and shipping, etc.? is that that non-trivial part?
Because I'm obviously missing something. What else is a shopping cart besides a session associated table?
See, this is what I don't understand. Building a shopping cart is like 15 minutes of work if I'm already building my own e-commerce site, isn't it? Are 3rd party shopping carts for non-programmers? I mean, as far as I can tell, it's literally just a session-associated table of items. What else is a shopping cart besides that? Why would I spend 2 days reading the "Zen cart" manual and API when I can finish my home brewed shopping cart in 15 minutes? Again, I'm not being a smart-ass, I really don't see what I'm missing. (thanks for your reply)
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