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2015 | Book

Requirements Read chapter Read first chapter

iOS eCommerce App Development with Parse

Author: Liangjun Jiang

Publisher: Apress

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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About this book

iOS eCommerce App Development with Parse uses a real-world app example to teach you how to build a complete eCommerce iPhone app powered by Parse - the most popular and powerful Platform As A Service (BaaS) provider.

In this comprehensive guide you will learn every step: collecting requirements, architecting the app, designing the visual interface, creating the data model, managing products and the shopping cart, processing the payment, and fulfilling the order - always with secure best practice in mind. You will also learn how to manage user account creation, login with Facebook and Twitter, verify users via email, pay with Stripe and Apple Pay, send email with Mailgun, and manage customer payment methods and order history.

Intermediate knowledge of iOS development and object-oriented programming is assumed, and basic knowledge of e-commerce principles will be of benefit too. The author is a successful iPhone app developer whose real-world experience is now brought to print. Master iOS eCommerce app development with Parse using this book today.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. Requirements
Abstract
This book is about understanding the steps involved in designing, architecting, building, and publishing an e-commerce mobile application. When using the term e-commerce in this book, I am referring to selling products and collecting money from customers. I will not cover how to put ads in a mobile app or provide a referral link when a customer makes a purchase on other sites or mobile apps.
Liangjun Jiang
Chapter 2. Planning and Building the Prototype
Abstract
Before you start to write the first line of code, it’s important to have a mock-up to see what the app looks like, what the user experience is like, what are the features are, and how they are organized. In this chapter, I will show you how to prototype the sample e-commerce iPhone app by using Xcode.
Liangjun Jiang
Chapter 3. Parse Fundamentals
Abstract
Parse has numerous features and functionality to help make a developer’s life easier. These features are covered throughout the book. This chapter focuses on the Parse iOS SDK.
Liangjun Jiang
Chapter 4. Parse Project Setup
Abstract
This chapter covers how to set up a Parse project. You will need to write down a few application keys and secrets. To make the process simple, start with a helper class to remember these keys and secrets.
Liangjun Jiang
Chapter 5. Product Category
Abstract
The Beauty & Me sample app that accompanies this book presents products to users in a traditional way. First of all, we let users sell all brands we are carrying. If you don’t know any brand, I will make up some, such as Origins, NUDE Skincare, etc. Under each brand, we have all products. When a user selects a product, the app displays the product detail. This chapter introduces the brand, or a more general name, product category.
Liangjun Jiang
Chapter 6. The Products Screen
Abstract
In this chapter, you will learn how to implement the Products screen. More specifically, you will learn how to display products and let users search your product list and filter products based on certain criteria. The first thing, however, is to create a product model.
Liangjun Jiang
Chapter 7. The Product Detail Screen
Abstract
In this chapter you learn how to implement the product detail screen, which includes information such as the product name, price, detail, and full-size image; the screen also includes a share menu as well as the option to buy a product or add it to a favorites list.
Liangjun Jiang
Chapter 8. The Sign-Up Feature
Abstract
In the previous chapter, you learned how to alert a user to sign up or log in when adding a product to the shopping bag or to the Favorites list. In this chapter, you implement a dispatch screen that enables users to create an account, log into an existing account, or log in with Facebook. You also learn how to sign up customers. How to implement the direct log in and log in with Facebook features are covered in Chapter 9.
Liangjun Jiang
Chapter 9. The Login Feature
Abstract
In the previous chapter, you learned how to sign up new users. In this chapter, you will learn how to implement the log in and log in with Facebook features.
Liangjun Jiang
Chapter 10. Shopping Bag
Abstract
At this point, if you followed along, you have a registered user who is ready to add products into his or her shopping bag. In this chapter, I show you how to add a product to the shopping bag, update the product’s quantity, delete an individual product or all of them from the bag, and update the total amount. The customer should be able to see what’s in the bag when he or she returns to it.
Liangjun Jiang
Chapter 11. Shipping Address
Abstract
In Chapter 10, you learned how to implement features such adding a product to the shopping bag, updating the product’s quantity, deleting a product from the bag, and updating the total amount. In order for customers to complete the checkout process, however, you also need to collect additional information that you don’t have yet: namely, the customer’s shipping and billing addresses.
Liangjun Jiang
Chapter 12. Pay with Credit Card
Abstract
In the previous chapter, I talked about capturing a user’s shipping address before checking out. In this chapter, I cover how a user can pay with a credit card. For this app, you will use the Stripe iOS SDK to make the process easier. To incorporate the Stripe iOS SDK, you need to update your Cocoapods Podfile by adding these two lines:
Liangjun Jiang
Chapter 13. Pay with Apple Pay
Abstract
As an iOS developer, you have probably heard of Apple Pay. Apple Pay lets iPhone users pay for purchases by using their iPhones. There are some great benefits in store for a developer to integrate Apple Pay in his or her app. For example, your customers don’t need to enter a credit card number, expiration date, and CVC numbers; or in some cases, shipping address and billing address before making a purchase. All of this means a faster and more convenient checkout process. Another benefit is that it’s supposed to be a much secure way to handling credit card charges. In this chapter, I will show how to implement the feature of Pay with Apple Pay and Stripe.
Liangjun Jiang
Chapter 14. Charge and E-Mail
Abstract
In Chapter 12, I showed you how to use the cloud function to create and charge a Stripe Customer. In Chapter 13, I showed you how to use a cloud function to pay with Apple Pay. All three methods call functions of “createStripeCustomer,” “chargeCustomer,” and “chargeToken,” respectively, in a JavaScript file with a name of “main.js” that you have written and hosted on Parse. The three functions take a dictionary input to execute and return either a string if successful or an NSError object if any error occurs. In this chapter, I will show you how you can implement these three JavaScript functions. In addition, you will learn how to use Mailgun to send an order confirmation once Stripe has successfully charged a user’s credit card.
Liangjun Jiang
Chapter 15. My Account
Abstract
At this point, the app can finish its main job—buy and then pay for products. However, there is still some work to do to make it a complete app. For instance, users should be able to change their shipping addresses and update their payment methods. They should also be able to look up the products they marked as favorites, look up their order history, and log out of their account—none of these features have been implemented yet.
Liangjun Jiang
Chapter 16. Add Product
Abstract
So far, you have added products for your app through the Parse project dashboard on Parse.com. Once your app goes live, it probably isn’t a good idea to allow everyone to do this. A few issues might arise if you let everyone access the Parse Dashboard.
Liangjun Jiang
Chapter 17. Promotion
Abstract
Push notification marketing is frequently used to promote discounts, deals, and new products. In general, creating the feature of push notification marketing can be quite complicated. A common use case is that once an app receives a push notification and a user taps it, the app will bring up the product page directly or a promotion section within this app. It will take quite an effort to establish features like this. However, we also have seen a use case like this: The user’s device received a push notification; the user opens the app and then sees a promotion page. This page acts like a flyer and has content similar to “Check out our new products.” Or “10% off for X’mas.” Since the flyer page is an overlay on top of the main app, it can be dismissed with a tap. In this chapter, I will show you how to implement this behavior by using Parse’s easy-to-use push notification feature.
Liangjun Jiang
Chapter 18. Security
Abstract
So far, I have discussed all of the features for an e-commerce iPhone app that I want to talk about except one: how secure the implementation is, or how safe it is to use Parse. I will use this chapter to cover the Parse security features and how you could follow some industry-standard best practices to make this iPhone app more secure.
Liangjun Jiang
Chapter 19. More from Parse
Abstract
In Chapter 8, I introduced the sign-up feature. But how do you know whether the user has entered a valid e-mail? You need to do some verification to make sure the e-mail address the user entered is a valid e-mail address format. But you don’t really do anything to make sure the e-mail address actually belongs to the user. In the world of e-commerce, e-mail marketing proves to still be effective. So you need a way to verify the e-mail while a user is signing up.
Liangjun Jiang
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
iOS eCommerce App Development with Parse
Author
Liangjun Jiang
Copyright Year
2015
Publisher
Apress
Electronic ISBN
978-1-4842-1317-9
Print ISBN
978-1-4842-1318-6
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-1317-9

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