August 6, 2015 Update: The book has been updated for Laravel 5.1 and includes a new chapter titled "Integrating a Shopping Cart"!

The local lawn care and landscaping company We Dew Lawns, Inc. has contacted you about building and launching an ambitious corporate website. The surly company owner Todd McDew isn't exactly a technophile, but he's well aware of the potential new revenue streams a well-designed website can introduce to the company. Among other features he would like you to create an online store capable of selling both electronic and physical products, as well as lawn care service subscriptions.

Easy E-Commerce Using Laravel and Stripe guides you through the creation of the WeDewLawns.com. Each project phase introduces new features to the website which are typical of a small but capable online store, including a robust contact form, user accounts, and a restricted area where registered users can download coupons and receive other exclusive offers. You'll also learn how to create a product catalog which can be managed using a restricted administration console.

From there you'll learn how to integrate the popular Stripe payment processing service using Laravel Cashier. You'll learn how to customize many aspects of a Stripe account, customize the Stripe checkout modal, and create a solution which customers can use to download electronic products such as lawn care guides. The final project phase guides you through the integration of Stripe's recurring payments (subscriptions) feature. You'll learn how to create multiple subscription tiers, and build a robust interface allowing customers to select a desired tier and input their payment information for subsequent recurring billing purposes.

Book Highlights

• Includes all of the source code to a real-world online store.
• You will receive free updates as we continue to improve and expand the book and companion project.

• Learn how to integrate Stripe payment processing capabilities into a Laravel-powered website in a fun, entertaining, and unintimidating fashion by following along with the creation of a real-world project for a fictional company. Just don't get on company owner Mr. McDew's bad side!

• Includes coverage of many concepts central to building an online store, such as how to build a product management interface and a one-time URL generator for downloading electronic products.
• Written by bestselling author W. Jason Gilmore and Laravel News founder Eric L. Barnes, two industry veterans with more than 30 years of combined experience using the PHP language.

Table of Contents

Easy E-Commerce Using Laravel and Stripe is divided into five 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.