[thelist] Front Page - (is ecommerce really that hard?)

[Susan Wallace]

Hi everyone,

In addition to what has been mentioned before, I wanted to share my thoughts:

I understand that the 'design' of an e-commerce site is not *that hard* to
do - but what scares me about someone who does not know "big HTML words" is
that they may actually manage to convince someone that they can put their
store online with "secure" transactions. If they manage to figure out just
how to put an SSL key on a site, and have that function, where are the
credit card numbers stored? How can they be accessed? (fill in the rest of
the blanks)

I don't mean to sound rude, but with that being on *my* head to deal with,
there is no way I would trust anyone's out of the box solution unless I
could spend a heinous amount of time digging through the code, see exactly
how things are handled, scour the web and the evolt site looking for all of
the pitfalls - and find out how to deal with them, before I would even
attempt to try to "sell" the service to anyone - set it up for them,
customize, etc.

That's just the part that has to function for the user and administrator of
the store. There is this complete other part of any kind of transaction
processing that happens with the merchant - statement reconciliation etc.

For example, I have been handling e-commerce sites for about 4 years now,
and I just recently had a client "school" me on what was happening with her
bank statements. The gist was that she had not done as I asked her to do
and go through the site once I was done with my end. I had requested
specifically that she run test transactions with multiple card types and
then go into her merchant account and check the status of each, the result
codes etc. She claims to have done this, however, for 18 months, she
"overlooked" the fact that she was paying a higher rate because the
transactions were sent non-qualified. I specifically outline in my
contracts that the rates charged for transactions vary by Financial
Institution and that it is explicitly the client's responsibility to know
what those rates are, and determine how they want to handle the processing
from the store, and to deal with the transaction once it has been
processed. On top of that, some things changed about her processor in the
mean time, and she did not read the notification of the changes when it
came. She is not very happy about it, but the bottom line is that I covered
that in the contract - she chose not to read it or ask questions. (This is
a little over-simplified, but hopefully it makes some sense.) Had I been a
complete newbie, I would be finding myself in court right now being asked
to pay for her bank fees for 18 months. ::shudder::

Because it would be too long, I won't go into the other parts about having
to know and understand your client's business model, shipping practices,
etc, the fact that all businesses have different ways of handling book
keeping, shipping, order processing - and an "out of the box" solution does
not _necessarily_ fit with their business model.

I don't say that to be mean, but I think it sets a new person up for a bad
fall and possibly a lawsuit if they are led to believe that this is
actually a cake walk and then they find out later that they only knew about
one tenth of what they needed to know.

Hope this helps someone,

Susan
(hoping that I did not come off too snippy)