In this chapter, we built a simple yet functional Sales module. With just four simple entities (Cart, CartItem, SalesOrder, and SalesOrderItem), we managed to implement simple cart and checkout features. By doing so, we empowered customers to actually make a purchase, instead of just browsing the product catalog. The sales module made use of the payment and shipment services defined in previous chapters. While the payment and shipment services are implemented as imaginary, dummy ones, they do provide a basic skeleton that we can use for real payment and shipment API implementations.

Furthermore, in this chapter, we addressed the admin dashboard, by making a simple interface that merely aggregates a few of the existing CRUD interfaces. Access to the dashboard and the management links is protected by entries in app/config/security.yml, and allowed only for ROLE_ADMIN.

Together, the modules written so far make up a simplified application. Writing robust web shop applications would normally include tens of other features found in modern e-commerce platforms such as Magento. These include multiple language, currency, and website support; robust category, product, and product inventory management; shopping cart and catalog sales rules; and many others. Modularizing our application makes development and maintenance processes easier.

Moving forward, in the final chapter, we will look into distributing our modules.