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My company is looking to integrate an e-commerce site into our currently existing web app. The problem is that, for the most part, e-commerce sites let you create a sexy looking, standalone store on their site, but there is no way to really make it a part of your app. Some sites, like Shopify, for example, will let you embed a pre-built piece of javascript which launches a lightbox onto your site. But this lightbox essentially just launches their web page from your browser.

I'm looking for a solution that fits the following needs:

  • Download product listings through an API and list the information how I want on my site.

  • We need to restrict the purchase of certain products to only members who are logged in through our site.

  • I would prefer a friendly interface for creating events. That way I don't have to code up an entire event-creation interface. Our API would then download these created events.

  • For the actual paying and checkout, it's OK to send them to the e-commerce site. I imagine that's necessary for security reasons. But this happens only after they've clicked a product.

Does a product like this exist?

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    With the amount of control you want to exercise, you may want to look at the simpler "outsourced payment detail handling" APIs of payment gateways rather than any full e-commerce solution. Of course then you have to code your product and display DB, but it seems to me that will be easier. For example cybersource.com/resources/collateral/pdf/… - I've integrated a site with CyberSource before, but not that specific interface. Many other payment-processors have similar offerings.
    – Neil Slater
    May 9 '14 at 15:14
  • That is a good solution and I will consider it if nothing else works out. However, I suppose that would mean starting with absolutely no user-friendly interface for creating content. I want something already developed for us that my boss can use to create the events. I added this clarification in my question.
    – J-bob
    May 9 '14 at 15:21
  • Have you checked my answer here: Amazon Search App that hides items? It fits your question even better, as what you describe is pretty much what I use this API for (except for the logged-in only thingy, which is dealt with differently). The API lets you retrieve all metadata. It's then up to you to do with it what you want.
    – Izzy ♦
    May 9 '14 at 19:27
  • What do you mean with "events"? Listings of products et cetera?
    – PetaspeedBeaver
    Nov 18 '16 at 12:26
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To me it sounds like you're looking for a e-commerce framework rather than a complete e-commerce system with a cms? -- even though you of course could highly customize any of the big e-commerce solution like Magento or Prestashop to look like you want.

I suggest you check out Konakart. Maybe Apache Open for Business could be interesting too, but I haven't looked into that so much.

Konakart is used for example by this book shop, to add e-commerce to their custom site.

Another option could be to use an e-commerce solution supplied as "software as a service", like Shopify, and then use their API to integrate the products in your existing web page. In the case of Shopify the API is called Javascript Buy SDK.

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    Is Apache Open for Business suitable for this?
    – PetaspeedBeaver
    Nov 18 '16 at 12:34
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So you need a fully API-ready e-commerce backend. I would suggest that you take a look to Sylius, it's built as a Symfony bundle and is the most developer-friendly e-commerce framework that I know. You can check out all the data available through its APIs here.

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