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This is what I have and I was wondering if someone could tell me what they think about it. Any advice is appreciated.

Products

pd_id

manufacturer

option (color or w/e)

description

specifications

price

sale_price

distributor_1#

distributor_2#

distributor_3#

manufacturer#

inventory

show_hide (viewable to public)

stock_status (in stock/out of stock)

pd_img_1

pd_img_2

pd_img_3

pd_img_4

pd_img_5

pd_img_6

pd_img_7

pd_img_8

weight

date_added

 

categories

cat_id

cname

cmeta

ctitle

cimg

menu (display in left hand navigation)

manufacturer (manufacturer or category)

 

subCategories

sub_cat_id

cat_id (parent id)

sname

smeta

stitle

simg

 

productCat (relationship between product and it's multiple categories)

cat_id

sub_cat_id

pd_id

 

cart

ct_id

ct_session

ct_qty

ct_date

pd_id

 

orders

order_id

cart_id

user_id

sfirst_name

slast_name

ship_address

ship_address2

ship_city

ship_zip

ship_state

ship_country

ship_amt (shipping cost)

tax

total

date

ship_status (shipped/ processing)

comments (customer comments)

notes (employee notes)

 

users

user_id

email

password

bfirst_name

blast_name

bill_address

bill_address2

bill_city

bill_state

bill_zip

bill_country

bill_phone

cc_type

cc_number

cc_code

cc_month

cc_year

user_ip

 

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Some background on the setup would be nice, which DBMS, physical location, if its a single storefront, local, international, multilingual, ties into external sources (inventory, CRM), etc.

 

I'm not a fan of abbreviations in column names, pd* and ct* and hinted names such as cname and sname are useless as their full names are categories.cname and subCategories.sname which is a bit ridiculous, trim it up and make it cleaner.

 

I think this is a preference but I know it annoys the hell out of real DBAs are table names should be named what a single row of the table is.  A user record should come from the 'user' table, an order should be in the 'order' table.  I say its up to you though.

 

users can have many addresses (billing/home, work, friend/gift) then you can link to it (like in your orders table)

users can have many payment methods (multiple credit cards, debit cards, payment gateways)

 

some products have many options (ex. a shirt can have gender, size and colour) how are you dealing with that?

 

make a table for all images, not a fan of n-number columns (ex. pd_img_n), less work if you need to edit image paths

 

I also seperate out product and stock to allow the store owner to track stock a little more visibly.  Stock can possibly be supplied by different distributors, its good to see where you're running low from who.  Really depends on how much inventory management you want though.

 

table for suppliers/distributors would be good and a m2m linking to which products they sell

 

Storing credit card info is bad (a liability), avoid when you can.  My country has privacy standards and as such credit card info needs to be encrypted and not in plain text it falls under 'reasonable protection'.

 

PCI Compliance is becomming more important, check out the Data Security Standard (DSS), Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS) and PIN Transaction Security (PTS) documents.  They cover a lot, but its always good to be aware.

 

Put indexes on all your columns you sort by, if you can sort a result listing by price, weight, manufacturer, etc put an index on it.

 

There are a couple of little things, column names are a bit inconsistent, you use 'description' and 'specifications' but later you have 'ct_qty' and 'ship_amt'.  Some DBMS dont allow capitals in table names, might want to lower-case those.

 

Taxes are a bit queer, they can be where the seller is, where the buyer is, there can be no tax and there can be customs/broker fees.  Kind of depends where you are and where you're selling to.  Have I mentioned I dislike dealing with them?

 

password_md5 or password_sha1 may be more descriptive and appropriate

 

I think that's all I have to say for now.

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