[thelist] eXtropia/ Web Store

[Jorah Lavin]

At 06:07 AM 9/8/00, John Scoot wrote:

>We're just doing our first e-commerce site for a client who sells TVR &
>Lotus accessories. We did a detailed evaluation of most of the known
>Shopping Cart software and settled on Actinic Catalog which scored top on
>four criteria:- flexibility, quality, ease of integration and customisation
>. We are 90% through building the site, which includes some fairly complex
>product mixes, variations etc, and the software is living up to
>expectations.

I just got a flyer for this outfit and looked at the site. The application 
looks really good, and I appreciate John's comments on usability.

At the moment I'm trying to do an online store "on the cheap" for a friend, 
and I'm trying to install Web Store from extropia: 
<http://www.extropia.com/> Anyone have any war stories about this 
application?  It looks like it has a pretty extensive chat board set up, 
which doesn't exactly build my confidence as a cgi-newbie.  I got the 
application installed on the UN*X server where I host sites, and got to the 
point of successfully pinging the cgi script, so I'm making progress, but 
the documentation does the usual trick of starting out hand-holding and 
then leaping directly into obscurity.  For instance, there is no mention of 
how I'm supposed to get the product list into the database file... is it as 
simple as formatting the output of the Access file as a pipe-delimited file 
and just saving it under the same name?

I think I asked this last May when I first tried to install the app, but 
I'll ask again... anyone out there familiar with the Web Store script who 
would be willing to let me ask a few stupid questions while I step into the 
brave new world (for me) of database-driven shopping carts?

Thanks in advance...

-Jorah

PS: I've successfully set up the Merchant Order Form from RGA 
<http://www.io.com/~rga/> so I've gotten my feet wet on simple cgi scripts, 
but it isn't something I'm at all comfortable with.