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e-commerce Solutions for Online Merchants
by James Murray
You need a shopping cart for your electronic commerce Web site. First of all, what is a shopping cart? Basically it's a script that keeps track of items ordered, so that if a visitor wanders off to other sections of your site, their order is still stored, and they don't have to enter eveything all over again. Of course, the advanced packages offer various other features too, as we shall see.
September 13, 1999
This article is in two parts:
- Roll-your-own Solutions for Web Developers
- Off-the-shelf Options for Merchants
In the previous section, we looked at various free or cheap JavaScript shopping carts that can be modified to suit your purposes. We also discussed WebGenie, a mid-priced package that generates CGI scripts for custom shopping carts.
ShopSite
In contrast to WebGenie, ShopSite, from Open Market, Inc., has clearly targeted small-to-medium merchants rather than Web developers, and they have gone to such lengths to make an e-commerce site easy to set up that your mother can probably do it. Their preferred method of distribution is via email from your ISP, after the installation of the software has been completed on the server. When you log on, you're presented with a graphical front end that makes it a simple, fill-in-the-blanks effort to complete your site.
Seasoned Web developers will find ShopSite's template-based, fill-in-the-blanks approach much too restrictive, though. For these people (meaning, well - us) ShopSite provides more flexible options. The best of these is one they call "easy embed," and it means that the ShopSite Store Manager, if you want it to, will simply brew up the tags for you to insert in your HTML. Creating your e-commerce site becomes a simple matter of filling in the blanks, then copying and pasting into your pages. It's hard to imagine it getting any easier.
You can configure ShopSite to read product data from a database that you provide and upload. This, in fact, is the kind of setup you'll certainly want. Besides making updates simple and quick, it also makes it impossible for your shop to advertise a product at one price and end up selling it at another - a disaster for customer confidence or your balance sheet. Or both.
ShopSite is sold only through resellers, who often bundle ShopSite with services such as Web site hosting and Web design services. As such, pricing varies from provider to provider.
SoftCart
If we move all the way to the high end of the spectrum, forgetting the packages that require a small developer to take out a second mortgage on his house, we find a single player. Here is, as far as I'm concerned, the best solution I've found for e-commerce - if you can afford it. This is SoftCart , from Mercantec Inc., of Logan, Ill., http://www.mercantec.com.
SoftCart is also distributed only through ISP resellers, and is the most expensive solution I present here. But Mercantec delivers a wealth of options and features; there are FrontPage templates for users of Microsoft's Web development environment. There's a QuickBooks export module for users of that popular bookkeeping program. There's even an integrated email client so you don't have to rely on calls to an external program to send receipts and order confirmations. Support for various payment systems for electronic commerce is built in (does anybody use these, by the way?).
There's still more, but the true jewel in the crown is the SoftCart executable itself, in my opinion. There are different versions, all written in ANSI C and compiled for different servers, and they seem to execute about as quickly as any CGI application you've ever seen. One of the few tricky chores to perform is to ensure that all the server's directory permissions are set up precisely according to plan. This is a bit of an adventure if you're a Unix idiot, as I am.
SoftCart is the only product in this article that does everything - and I mean everything - on the server. This means that modifications to your shopping cart don't happen in the blink of an eye, as they do with a cookie-based system, but it also means that they happen for everyone on the Web. It has other side benefits as well. The shopper's unique session ID number, for example, is preserved along with his shopping cart on the server. The shopper can bookmark your site and surf off in search of price comparisons, currency conversions, or anything else that strikes his fancy. When he returns (via the bookmark) he'll find his shopping cart as he left it - a nifty feature!
The SoftCart documentation gets delivered to you electronically, in MSWord format. CGI and Unix novices will find it a little thin in a few places, and cryptic in a few others, but Mercantec's tech support is about as good as you'll find anywhere. They also offer plenty of extra services like an SDK, a developer's network, and various discounts for resellers, if you choose to become one yourself.
To summarize, I'm wading into electronic commerce myself, along with everyone else. The solutions I plan to use are these: If I'm going to sell trinkets to the natives, I'll kludge something together with Javascript. If I'm building the electronic equivalent of a frontier trading post, then I'll probably license something that's a little primitive, but functional, like WebGenie. To set up shop on Main Street, though, I plan to wince, groan, and then cough up the dollars for ShopSite. Finally, if I decide that I'm going to put Sears out of business with a vast and glittering assortment of merchandise, I'll need Mercantec's SoftCart and nothing less.
This article is in two parts:
- Roll-your-own Solutions for Web Developers
- Off-the-shelf Options for Merchants
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