Table of Contents
Easy E-Commerce Using Laravel and Stripe is divided into six chapters. Each chapter introduces a fundamental concept associated with building a practical online store for a small business interested in building its customer base, selling products, and selling online subscriptions.
Chapter 1. Creating the We Dew Lawns Website
In this opening phase you'll be tasked with the creation of a fairly simple Laravel-driven website that tells prospective customers more about the business, and offers a user-friendly contact form which sends inquiries to the company assistant, Patty Organo.
To suit this requirement, you'll work through the creation of a new Laravel 5 website complete with Less, Elixir, and Bootstrap integration. You'll also create a home and company bio pages, a site-wide layout, and a contact form.
Chapter 2. Integrating User Accounts
Following a successful launch of the first phase, Mr. McDew would like to begin building a customer mailing list. To entice individuals into handing over their valuable e-mail addresses he would like to offer registered users access to downloadable coupons which they can then apply to lawn care services. In this chapter you'll integrate and customize user registration and authentication features into the site, and create a restricted area of the site accessible only to authenticated users.
Chapter 3. Integrating Stripe and Creating a Product Catalog
With the site launched and the mailing list continuing to grow, Mr. McDew's ambitions have now turned to online sales. He would like to create a simple online store for selling products such as lawn mowers and gardening tools. In this chapter you'll integrate Laravel Cashier to easily and securely accept credit card payments. You'll also learn how to create a restricted administration console complete with a product catalog manager so Mr. McDew and his team can easily add and update products.
Chapter 4. Selling Electronic and Physical Products
With Stripe and Laravel Cashier integrated, and your product catalog created, it's time to begin selling products! In this chapter you'll learn how to sell electronic (downloadable) and physical products through your website. We'll show you how to integrate the secure Stripe "Buy" button and modal, complete transactions using Cashier, and generate one-time URLs for automated product downloads. We'll also talk a bit about shipping and sales tax complexities, and identify a few popular associated resources.
Chapter 5. Selling Subscriptions
In this final project phase, Mr. McDew sets his sights on selling lawn care subscriptions. In this chapter you'll learn how to integrate Stripe's recurring billing service into the We Dew Lawns website, and sell a number of lawn care service tiers to area customers. You'll also learn how to configure webhooks to autonomously receive and respond to various subscription-related events.
Chapter 6. Integrating a Shopping Cart
Thus far we've preferred to focus on Laravel- and Stripe-related fundamentals so as to ensure everything is working flawlessly before introducing more complicated features. In this chapter we'll change that by adding shopping cart capabilities to the site. By the conclusion of this chapter you'll have successfully integrated a shopping cart into the site, allowing customers to truly shop the site, and conveniently purchase more than one product during a single session.
