[thelist] ecommerce, shopping carts, etc.

aardvark roselli at earthlink.net
Thu Sep 7 15:49:12 CDT 2000


there's another approach... one i've used a bit with very good 
success...

first, there needs to be a couple things going on... does the client 
already process credit card orders from, say, phone/fax/mail 
orders?  does the client understand that credit cards can't be hit 
(although the amount can be reserved) until the product ships (in 
the US)?  does the client need real-time processing?

if the client already handles cc orders and such, try just capturing 
the data...

let customers enter their info... it's up to your app to validate it, run 
a mod check against the cc number, assign an order number to 
the customer, and write the whole thing to a *secured* db...

the client comes in once a day/week/hour/month and retrieves the 
orders by logging into a *secured* web page, and printing orders or 
capturing the data somehow (depends on your client, most of mine 
wanted to print it to add to the stack of mail orders)... the client or 
the application then deletes orders after a pre-determined period of 
time, after they are fulfilled, after a data extraction, never, 
whatever...

the advantages are of course cost, and the fact that the client 
doesn't have to change the way he/she/it does business...

i've also piggy-backed not-for-profits onto the ISP's key, saving a lot 
of hassle, with some explanatory text about what is going to 
happen to the URL in the address bar...

this isn't always the best solution, but there are variations on it, of 
course... and you need to make sure the whole process is properly 
secured as well...





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