Building your first Shopping Basket: A friendly guide to C# and Razor Pages

Stop Overcomplicating E-Commerce. Build a Real, Production-Ready Storefront from Scratch .

Building a functional e‑commerce application shouldn’t feel like an impossible puzzle. With so many options, from complex JavaScript frameworks to subscription‑based website builders, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed before you’ve even written a line of code.

If that sounds familiar, this book is for you.

Building Your First Shopping Basket is a practical, step‑by‑step guide to creating a real, working e‑commerce application using ASP.NET Core Razor Pages. Written by me, James Craig Haddad, a freelance IT professional with over 20 years of experience, this book focuses on clarity, simplicity, and real-world results rather than abstract theory or unnecessary complexity.

What You Will Build

Rather than isolated snippets, you will construct a clean, fully functional web application from the ground up:

Storefront & Basket: Product catalog browsing, session management, and shopping basket workflows.

Payment Integration: Secure checkout implementation using PayPal .

Transactional Email: Automated order confirmations and customer communication powered by Brevo .

Admin Management: Back-end administration area for managing products, categories, and orders.

Built-in Security: Robust authentication, data protection, and access control.

Cloud Deployment: Complete deployment pipeline to Railway , taking your code from localhost to production.

Who This Book Is For

Self-Taught Developers & Hobbyists: Want to build a genuine project rather than follow abstract, toy examples.

Developers New to .NET (or Returning): Looking for a clean, modern introduction to ASP.NET Core Razor Pages.

Entrepreneurs & Creators: Want full ownership of their code, data, and user experience without being locked into high monthly platform fees.

You don’t need deep theoretical knowledge or years of enterprise experience. Every chapter logically builds on the last, explaining the plumbing of the web in plain, straightforward terms.

By the end of this book, you won’t just understand Razor Pages—you’ll own a complete, customisable e-commerce application that you can launch, scale, and build upon.

You don’t need years of experience or deep theoretical knowledge. What you do need is curiosity, a willingness to learn, and an interest in understanding how the “plumbing” of the web actually works. Every chapter builds on the last, and every feature, from the storefront to the admin area and from the security layer to the payment workflow, is something you can use, extend, and deploy.

By the end of this book, you won’t just understand Razor Pages inside and out. You’ll have a fully functional e‑commerce application that you control from top to bottom—one you can customise, launch, and use as the foundation for whatever you want to build next.