What are common pitfalls to avoid when designing a shopping cart system using PHP and MySQL?
One common pitfall to avoid when designing a shopping cart system using PHP and MySQL is not properly sanitizing user input, which can leave the system vulnerable to SQL injection attacks. To solve this issue, always use prepared statements or parameterized queries to interact with the database.
// Example of using prepared statements to avoid SQL injection
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("SELECT * FROM products WHERE id = :product_id");
$stmt->bindParam(':product_id', $product_id);
$stmt->execute();
$product = $stmt->fetch();