Building a shopping cart

E-commerce is a huge business on the web. An integral part of most e-commerce sites is the use of a shopping cart system. This recipe will walk through how to use Laravel sessions to store items for sales and build a shopping cart.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we need a standard installation of Laravel, as well as a properly set up and configured MySQL database.

How to do it...

To complete this recipe, follow these given steps:

1. In our database, create a table and add some data with this SQL code:

   CREATE TABLE items (
       id int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
       name varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
       description text,
       price int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
       PRIMARY KEY (id)
       ) ENGINE=InnoDB;
   
     INSERT INTO items VALUES ('1', 'Lamp', 'This is a Lamp.','14');
     INSERT INTO items VALUES ('2', 'Desk', 'This is a Desk.','75');
     INSERT INTO items VALUES ('3', 'Chair', 'This is a
       Chair.', '22');
     INSERT INTO items VALUES ('4', 'Sofa', 'This is a
       Sofa/Couch.', ...