From offline to online, businesses have very swiftly adjusted and adopted new trends. Captivating users online and staying competitive in the market is indispensable. Representation of the product with their descriptions certainly is crucial, but what is more important is the swift and easy access to every feature without any interruption.
Developing an eCommerce store that stands out from others requires the right tools and technology integration. From choosing the right programming language to frameworks, every step is requisite. In this article, we will share how Laravel is the perfect choice to develop an eCommerce framework.
Why Laravel For eCommerce Development?
Laravel is also called a progressive framework! It is because it grows as your website or application grows. Laravel offers a myriad of tools and frameworks, which is ideal for developing modern and full-stack applications.
Laravel leverages developers with a vast library of documentation, guides, tutorials, and tools like dependency injection, unit testing, queues, & more.
Some more of its advantages are:
Scaling-friendly framework – Ranging from built-in support to distributed cache, Laravel has all to handle millions of requests per month. Laravel Vapor also offers limitless scalability on AWS’s latest technology.
Large ecosystem – Laravel is fine-tuned and can seamlessly handle enterprise workloads. It is only possible because thousands of talented developers contribute to the framework. Thus, Laravel consists of the best packages in the PHP ecosystem.
Popularity of Laravel
Some of the most famous Fortune 500, startups and popular eCommerce websites have been developed using Laravel, like Alison, AlphaCoders, CheckPeople, and more.
When checking its popularity, around 13% of the respondents prefer to choose Laravel for building and running a project.
JetBrains conducted a survey of developers on Laravel and was known that PhPStorm has been a popular and ideal plugin choice (about 54.01%). Additionally, VS Code is the editor choice for about 40.24% of developers.
Laravel is used by 95.40% of developers to develop business applications with 89.63% heavily relying on traditional debugging techniques.
What Features Make Laravel Appropriate For Modern Web-App Development?
Laravel offers solutions that are needed for modern web application development. Here are the features you can integrate that are provided by Laravel:
Authentication: This feature is often tricky and risky to authenticate users to web applications. Hence, Laravel has made it easy with ‘Guards’ and ‘Providers’ to ensure the utmost security of the software. The best part is that you can always tweak the behavior of Laravel’s authentication services.
Authorization: Authorize ensure that a few of the features are restricted to the users, even if the user is authenticated. Laravel allows ‘gates’ and ‘policies’ which are like routes and controllers. These both offer simple as well as group logic control around the resource.
Eloquent ORM: This feature includes an object-relational mapper(ORM) which makes seamless interaction possible with the database. Eloquent ORM creates a model that interacts with the database table to retrieve records. Additionally, the model lets you insert, delete, and update records from the database table.
Database Migrations: Every web app or software needs to interact with the database to retrieve data, and Laravel makes it smooth and easy as a pie. Laravel leverages seamless database operations through a fluent and convenient interface that can be developed through a query builder.
Database Migration: Another wonderful component offered by Laravel is swift and easy database migration allowing the team to define and share the app’s database schema definition. This leverages your team members to manually add or create even after pulling changes from source control.
Validation: A developer creating a web application in Laravel will experience the most efficient and smooth development journey. Laravel leverages a myriad of validation rules, which can be applied to data or validated if the values are uniquely given in a database. You can check the Laravel validation guide to explore different approaches and validation rules on its official site.
Notification and Mails: Laravel offers a clean email API-powered mailer component. This component is the popular Symfony Mailer that makes sending email possible from anywhere and any service like SMTP, Mailgun, Postmark, Resend, Amazon SES, and more.
Laravel also ensures that the response time is minimal. With interface (ShouldQueue) and trait (Queueable) imported for all notifications, sending notifications becomes quick and easy.
File Storage: There is no doubt that Laravel has a powerful and robust filesystem abstraction. The Flysystem PhP package is integrated with simple drivers that can seamlessly work with Amazon S3, SFTP, and Even better. Because it is so simple to implement and use, it also makes the switch between the storage options (local development machine and production) plain sailing.
Job Queues: Another phenomenal feature that makes Laravel an appropriate choice when thinking of eCommerce business ideas, is creating job queues. Laravel eliminates the need for tedious & time taking tasks like parsing & storing CSV files. Queueing time-intensive tasks can certainly respond to web requests even faster while enhancing the user experience.
Task Scheduling: This feature in Laravel is a relief for experienced developers who have written cron configuration entries for every task. Laravel’s command scheduler lets developers express command schedules within the application. With just one entry, your tasks can be defined in the application without any hassle.
Testing: Those who have decided to select Laravel for eCommerce development have picked the best as this is among the frameworks that were built with testing in mind. With convenient helper methods, developers can indicatively test the app. The test decides and underlines that your system or app is functioning as expected. Hence, Laravel’s apps come with two directories: Unit & feature to focus code differently depending on how much code you want to test.
Events & Websockets: Suppose you want an automated message to be sent to your customers every time their order is processed, ready to ship, and in transition. Instead of coupling the code, developers can simply raise an event ‘App\events\in transit’ for the user to receive. This is what Events are capable of, they can decouple various app aspects with observer patterns. Its implementation leverages you to listen to events and subscribe within the application. There is a specific directory to store event classes: app/Events and one for listeners: app/Listeners. You can generate them if you can’t see them too using Artisan console commands.
Note: To develop eCommerce in Laravel you should know the following:
- Laravel & PHP framework understanding
- PHP 8.0 Installed
- DMS and Composer Integrated
- Understanding of HTML, CSS, Node.js, and JavaScript
Steps for Laravel ECommerce Development Solution
1. Environment Setup
To initiate you must first set up the Laravel environment. Installing Laravel via Composer requires this command:
composer create-project –prefer-dist laravel/laravel ecommerce-website
Then, you must set up your database and configure Laravel to use it:
DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
DB_PORT=3306
DB_DATABASE=ecommerce
DB_USERNAME=root
DB_PASSWORD=yourpassword
Finally, Database migration! Run the following code of Laravel to allow seamless access to database tables:
php artisan migrate
Your Environment is Set Up!
2. Structuring eCommerce Website
In order to develop an eCommerce solution, you must integrate all these features in your project:
- User Dashboard
- Admin Dashboard
- Mobile-Friendly Website
- 3-Step Booking Process
- Order Tracking
- Email Notifications
- Subscriber Form
- A product search form
- Payment Gateway(PayU) Integrated
- Shopping Cart in a Responsive Layout
- Pre-Defined Content with High-Resolution Photos
- Search engine optimization (SEO) for Products
- Recommendations and related products in our categories
3. Defining User Roles
It is essential to have defined user roles or parties in the eCommerce system. First is the Admin or the owner of the store and second is the buyer or the customer that purchases the goods.
Read More: A Guide to Laravel CMS Development in 2025
4. Adding Store Details
Products that are stored need to be tracked. A store owner must know the inventory status and delivery details of the product ordered. In order to do so, you must create a product model by running this command:
php artisan make:model Product -m
Further, you must open the migration file define the schema for the table of products, and then run the migration:
public function up()
{
Schema::create(‘products’, function (Blueprint $table) {
$table->id();
$table->string(‘name’);
$table->text(‘description’);
$table->decimal(‘price’, 8, 2);
$table->string(‘image’)->nullable();
$table->timestamps();
});
}
php artisan migrate
5. Creating Controllers for Operations
Controller or Product Controller is meant to display the products on the eCommerce store. Hence, to create it, you must add methods. Methods will list the product with their details to the individuals viewing them:
php artisan make:controller ProductController
Defining these controllers ensures they route to any URL. So you must define the controller for each below in the table:
| Operation | Controllers |
| Login | UserController |
| User Registration | UserController |
| Profile | UserController |
| View product listing | ProductController |
| View a single product | ProductController |
| Edit a product | ProductController |
| Add a new product | ProductController |
| Order product | OrderController |
| View all orders | OrderController |
| View a single-order | OrderController |
| Deliver an order | OrderController |
In order to list all the products, you must run this command:
public function index()
{
$products = Product::all();
return view(‘products.index’, compact(‘products’));
}
public function show($id)
{
$product = Product::findOrFail($id);
return view(‘products.show’, compact(‘product’));
}
Also Read: AI in eCommerce – Exploring AI Use Cases In eCommerce Industry
6. Viewing The Product Catalog
After listing the products, it is time to display them. To do so, you must create views:
@section(‘content’)
<div class=”container”>
<h1>Product Catalog</h1>
<div class=”row”>
@foreach($products as $product)
<div class=”col-md-4″>
<div class=”card”>
<img src=”{{ $product->image }}” class=”card-img-top” alt=”{{ $product->name }}”>
<div class=”card-body”>
<h5 class=”card-title”>{{ $product->name }}</h5>
<p class=”card-text”>{{ $product->description }}</p>
<p class=”card-text”>${{ $product->price }}</p>
<a href=”{{ route(‘products.show’, $product->id) }}” class=”btn btn-primary”>View Product</a>
</div>
</div>
</div>
@endforeach
</div>
</div>
@endsection
Just like Creating Product Catalog, it is time to develop a shopping cart. If you hire eCommerce developers, you must ensure that they know how to implement blade templates or blades.
Integrating composer helps install Laravel packages that can be used for creating multiple features. Here, we can seamlessly install shopping cart functionality and configure it via Composer.
composer require bumbummen99/laravel-shoppingcart
public function addToCart(Request $request, $id)
{
$product = Product::findOrFail($id);
Cart::add($product->id, $product->name, 1, $product->price);
return redirect()->route(‘cart.index’);
}
To display the cart content, you should run the command:
@extends(‘layouts.app’)
@section(‘content’)
<div class=”container”>
<h1>Your Shopping Cart</h1>
<table class=”table”>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Product</th>
<th>Quantity</th>
<th>Price</th>
<th>Total</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
@foreach(Cart::content() as $item)
<tr>
<td>{{ $item->name }}</td>
<td>{{ $item->qty }}</td>
<td>${{ $item->price }}</td>
<td>${{ $item->total }}</td>
</tr>
@endforeach
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
@endsection
7. Payment Gateways
After creating, listing, and displaying the eCommerce cart, it is time for checkout. The Checkout is only made after the payment is been made. Thanks to Laravel’s Cashier Stripe provides subscription billing services.
Installing cashier packages requires a Cashier’s migration. However, to use it you may run the command:
| composer require laravel/cashier |
| php artisan vendor:publish –tag=”cashier-migrations” |
| php artisan migrate |
If you want it to be billable and perform billing tasks, like creating subscriptions, applying coupons, and updating payment info, then you must run this command:
use Laravel\Cashier\Billable;
class User extends Authenticatable
{
use Billable;
}
The checkout success route may look like this via Stripe Checkout:
use App\Models\Order;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use Laravel\Cashier\Cashier;
Route::get(‘/checkout/success’, function (Request $request) {
$sessionId = $request->get(‘session_id’);
if ($sessionId === null) {
return;
}
$session = Cashier::stripe()->checkout->sessions->retrieve($sessionId);
if ($session->payment_status !== ‘paid’) {
return;
}
$orderId = $session[‘metadata’][‘order_id’] ?? null;
$order = Order::findOrFail($orderId);
$order->update([‘status’ => ‘completed’]);
return view(‘checkout-success’, [‘order’ => $order]);
})->name(‘checkout-success’);
8. Authenticating Users
The eCommerce store’s application authentication configuration file is stored in config/auth.php. You can always tweak the behavior of the authentication from multiple well-documented options. First, retrieve the users’ authentication details then determine authentication for the current user, and finally, protect the routes.
<?php
namespace App\Http\Controllers;
use Illuminate\Http\RedirectResponse;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
class FlightController extends Controller
{
/**
* Update the flight information for an existing flight.
*/
public function update(Request $request): RedirectResponse
{
$user = $request->user();
// …
return redirect(‘/flights’);
}
}
Protect your route using this command:
| Route::get(‘/flights’, function () { // Only authenticated users may access this route…})->middleware(‘auth’) |
Note: Laravel leverages an eCommerce app development company to manually authenticate with application starter kits. You can visit Laravel’s docs section to learn more about the manual authentication process.
9. Optimizing and Managing
Order and inventory management is essential to make eCommerce scalable. Fields must be created in the products table to help manage inventory, track stock levels, and implement logic when orders are placed.
To ensure that your application runs in seconds, its cache must be configured. Laravel supports various caching backends like Redis, DynamoDB, and Memcached. This is an example of Laravel’s app obtaining Cache Instance:
<?php
namespace App\Http\Controllers;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Cache;
class UserController extends Controller
{
/**
* Show a list of all users of the application.
*/
public function index(): array
{
$value = Cache::get(‘key’);
return [
// …
];
}
}
Laravel’s Queue Management is phenomenal for performing tasks like parsing and storing an uploaded CSV file. Queues can stimulate and divert time-intensive tasks so the app can respond to web requests in no time.
use App\Jobs\ProcessPodcast;
// This job is sent to the default connection’s default queue…
ProcessPodcast::dispatch();
// This job is sent to the default connection’s “emails” queue…
ProcessPodcast::dispatch()->onQueue(’emails’);
10. Testing The Store
Laravel’s genius testing mind ensures you that your code is running as expected. You can run from HTTP testing to console tests, browser tests, database tests, and mock tests. The tests are run using pest or phpunit. Running test on Pest looks like this:
php artisan make:test UserTest –unit
<?php
test(‘basic’, function () {
expect(true)->toBeTrue();
});
While on the PHPUnit, it will look like this:
<?php
namespace Tests\Unit;
use PHPUnit\Framework\TestCase;
class ExampleTest extends TestCase
{
/**
* A basic test example.
*/
public function test_basic_test(): void
{
$this->assertTrue(true);
}
}
Final Words
Laravel is an elegant and expressive framework that allows you to develop multiple software or applications. You can hire Laravel developers to develop an eCommerce for your business. However, to develop a complex and robust eCommerce app you would require the assistance of an eCommerce development company tailored to business needs.
Laravel offers a guide for beginners to build feature-rich, robust, scalable and secure solutions which can be obtained from its official site.
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