| eCommerce, Part 3: Advanced Product Selection by Crimson Star |
Last month, we examined two simple types of on-line brochures and reviewed the basic operation of shopping carts in general. Now we will look at four specific examples. Basic Shopping Cart All shopping cart programs fill out the order form detail lines automatically. There are three remaining functions that a cart must provide. In a basic cart, product information such as catalog number, description and price is hard-coded into the HTML page that the user views. Changes to this information become more difficult as you increase the number of products or services you offer. Shipping charges must be calculated manually by the customer in both types of basic shopping carts. A table of shipping charges is usually provided to help them perform this task. In a basic cart, the completed order is e-mailed to you. There is no other copy of the order or record of the customer. Customers who place repeat orders must re-enter all of their shipping and billing information for each order. Even with these restrictions, the basic shopping cart is suitable for product lines that do not change often, where repeat business is not common. Basic Shopping Cart + ASCII The basic shopping cart can be enhanced by the use of standard text files, often called ASCII files. You might add two of these files to your system. First, put all of your product information into an ASCII file and have your shopping cart use that file when it fills out an order. Now it will be relatively easy to change this information in the future. Note that you will still have to hard-code the product display pages and modify them by hand. Second, have the cart add the customer information to a second ASCII file. This will give you a means to quickly track down information about any orders, without having to dig through countless e-mails. For security reasons, do not store credit card information in this file. This type of store should meet the needs of most people with a limited selection of products. If you have more than about fifty products however, you need a real database. Intermediate Shopping Cart + Off-line Database Have your checkbook handy because now you are asking for professional solutions, but they aren't cheap! We are going to make two important changes to our shopping cart system. Both require the services of an expert programmer. First, we need to replace the ASCII product file with a real database. In fact, there will be two databases. The complete product database will be located on your own computer and will always be kept up-to-date, based on your actual receipts and shipments. You will also perform all of your maintenance on this master database. You will publish a "smaller" copy of this database to your Web site, usually whenever you make important changes to it. This copy will only contain the product information that the shopping cart needs to fill out orders. It will not contain confidential information such as quantity-on-hand data, average cost, etc. Now that you have a real product database, you can create a program to calculate shipping charges automatically. Advanced Shopping Cart + On-line Database The advanced shopping cart adds full eCommerce capability to your site. The most direct approach is to modify the intermediate shopping cart, which could be done in stages. First, the program must assign a unique customer ID to each customer and a unique order number to each order. You need to maintain a complete customer file and orders file on your web server to facilitate this. WARNING -- you are responsible for the security of this information, even though your web site is hosted by someone else! The full product database should be on-line. When customers add an item to their shopping cart, the program can confirm that the item is in stock and reserve it for this customer. You must use this live database for all of your own accounting and maintenance duties. Again, you will want to provide a high level of security for this database. You can now provide on-line credit card processing. When customers submit orders, their transaction is authorized or rejected immediately. Next month we will review order processing in more detail.
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