[thelist] Flash Based E-Commerce Package

Seb Barre sebastien at oven.com
Fri Dec 1 13:47:16 CST 2000


At 01:28 PM 12/1/2000 -0600, you wrote:
>I've got a client that is producing 100% flash based sites that are 
>capable of full featured E-Commerce activity including shopping, auction 
>etc. Opinions of Flash aside is anyone aware of an effective package, 
>cart, to make this possible?

As far as I know, there isn't an integrated solution to do this kind of 
thing seamlessly, unless you're looking at Generator, and that's alot of 
money, and a major investment in time and infrastructure to support and 
develop properly.

However, if that's not an option, Flash is pretty good at communicating 
with server-side components, CGI-style.  You can post/receive information 
to/from CGIs or other server-side modules without reloading the Flash movie 
or changing URLs.  If you're containing everything in one movie, you can 
also take advantage of that fact to easily build in a persistent shopping 
cart, user profiles, etc..

But based on my experience (and having quickly talked this over with our 
Rich Media guys who've done this before - see: www.tiffanys.com, a highly 
successful Flash-driven e-commerce site), it's ALOT of work to pull off, so 
be prepared, and factor that into your time estimates for your client (who 
may have unreasonable timeframe expectations if they're comparing it to an 
HTML-based site).



--- -- -
Seb Barre - seb at oven.com
OVEN Digital Toronto
Work: 416-595-9750 x 222
Mobile: 416-254-5078
http://www.oven.com/





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