Re: shopping cart and credit card acceptance codes

We use an in-house cart, Diane.  I designed most of it myself, and so I have
some fundamental nut-and-bolts experience.

If you wish to simply get a cart installed because you manage your own
business site, you're in a different boat than me...I wanted one I could
resell.  In either case, you need to master certain skills.  For instance,
my cart consists of:

* A MySQL database to hold inventory and sales data
* A Perl script to track and process process sales
* XML configuration files for the script (they hold server-specific info to
enhance portability)
* Temporary XML disk files that actually hold the items for each customer
while shopping (the actual "cart" files.)
* A whole bunch of XML and HTML templates that are used to make the actual
web pages dynamically.  I made the HTML external to the script so it could
be easily customized from one site to the next.
* Additional "plug-ins" for 3rd-party features such as goship.com

So, you can see that learning to build a cart from scratch can involved a
couple of different disciplines, and it's not an overnight thing.

As an alternative, you might try a system such as the Dansie cart at
dansie.net.  This is a popular Perl application that costs way less than
mine customized software, and can be installed even on shared servers with
very little knowledge of Perl.  Dansie users most often hard-code the items
into HTML forms, and the user adds them to the cart with the usual "Add to
Cart" button.  The disadvantage is that you are locked into the existing
structure, and of course maintenace can be a pain if you have 300 items each
with their own page!  Dansie does allow for a catalog approach using a
flatfile, which is a way to compromise...

There are also free-low price carts that don't require Perl, but it's the
most common languange.

A final choice is to look for one of the systems that charges you an ongoing
monthly fee and actually hosts you cart and inventory for you on their
server.  An important consideration here is that you have less control over
the configuration and the pages, but what you do have may be enough for you.

If you are like me, the do-it-yourselfer:

A shopping cart is simply part of an overall ecommerce solution, which is
nothing more than a software application just like form handlers or other
CGI.  To build it yourself, you must first learn to write CGI scripts.
Being an Open Source boy, I would point you ate either Perl or PHP.  Perl
was my first language for web-based apps (I came to it from C), and it's
strongly rooted in the Unix tradition.  PHP is similar, but conceptually,
itr based on the embedded apprach where the code becomes part of the web
page (Like ASP), whereas Perl uses seperate files.

I hope this long-winded speech was of some help...:)

D


|-----Original Message-----
|From: owner-hwg-business(at)hwg.org [mailto:owner-hwg-business(at)hwg.org]On
|Behalf Of diane
|Sent: Monday, September 04, 2000 6:34 PM
|To: hwg-business(at)hwg.org
|Subject: shopping cart and credit card acceptance codes
|
|
| I am not sure if I am posting to the right place
|but here goes anyway.
|Being a new site developer, I am absolutely
|out of my depth.  I need to learn how to build
|the shopping cart thru the credit card acceptance
|page.  Is there existing code out there that can
|be used?
|I have the merchant account and all the
|other banking stuff but cannot figure out
|to build the pages.  Is this a question
|for guild?  I do not want to be impolite.
|Thank you
|Any help would be heaven sent!
|diane(at)tein.net
|

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