Is an e-commerce site possible through Laravel Cashier?

Yeah it's possible! Give this book a read: https://leanpub.com/easyecommerce

Yes charge is for single transactions. You could probably use it for an e-commerce site without to much problem. However I think that if you are not planning on using the subscription portion... then it is over kill and it is probably smarter to just use one of the MANY super great libraries for accepting payments.

stripe and braintree both have php libraries with great documentation.

I'm using stripe/stripe-php right now on 2 projects and it is working great for me. On one of them I only do single charges and the user enters in their card information at the time of purchase... In the other one I allow a user to set a card on their profile and then I do single charges against it later when they purchase something. The library works great for me and there are even some laravel specific wrappers already listed for it on github if you just search laravel stripe.

Anyway, let me know if you have any specific questions I might be able to help.

@isaackearl

Have you ever done any work with Beanstream? I'm working at a non-profit that uses this service. Also, we accept monthly donations which could benefit from having a "subscription" service?

@rslee1247

I have never used beanstream, but I just looked over the documentation a bit and it seems like it has everything you would need to do what you need. The api looks pretty good (similar to stripe etc).

Seems like you could set this up to do single charges no problem, and then take it a step further and save "profiles" as they call it in their documentation for users that you need to make reocurring payments for. You would have to similate a subscription service since it doesn't seem like it is a built in feature of beanstream... but I do this for one of my sites and it isn't that bad. You setup profiles for the customers... and then you setup a tasks that runs daily and checks if a user needs to be charged on that day (based on a subscription they sign up for). Takes a bit more work but it is definitely doable.

@isaackearl Wow, thank you very much. Seems like this is going to be an exciting project :)

Ran into some issues with cashier and e-commerce.

First in order to save and check a card to a user you must create the stripe user object first. I don't think cashier does that. It creates the charge object then a user.

Any case I ended up just using stripes API. The docs are great and it's pretty straight forward. I created a stripe payment class and just called in stripe through there as needed. I can easily swap it out if needed later.

Now a user can purchase with the same card or input one time card or update the current card for purchases. Cashier doesn't do that out of the box except for/after a subscription is successful.

Have you checked laravel spark? https://spark.laravel.com/

@AhmadYousef Spark is not an e-commerce system. It's for subscriptions and really used as a SaaS, no e-commerce.