Re: taking orders

>>>>>
Hi!  I've been putting off learning this, but it's time I figured out
how to take orders online.  I know HTML and can design a web site, but
I'd appreciate the expertise of you folks on taking secure orders.
<<<<<

At it's most basic, you have a form where people select to order an item
or items (all on one form). The form should be on an SSL enabled server.
So, when they come to the order page, they enter the numbers of what
they want, their payment information, and then when they click submit,
the information is processed by something like FormMail, or some other
form to email processor.

The complication comes when you have a number of items to process, all
on different pages. There what you need to find is a catalog program
that will save the state of anything the customer has ordered until they
get to the secure checkout page. The problem with web pages is that they
do no save state across various pages, so the catalog needs to be
processed through a program.

There are two types of programs/programming that can handle this: client
side or server side. Client side programming are things like JavaScript
catalogs, i.e. they require JavaScript to even operate. One I found
pretty nice of this type is from a company called Hallisoft. The
downside of a JavaScript catalog is that it absolutely requires
JavaScript to be enabled on the clients web browser to operate.

The other type of program is server side. 

I'm going to make an assumption here, that what you want is to learn how
to make a catalog, and are not necessarily looking for the one true
catalog to fulfill all your desires.

A simple to work with catalog is either Commerce.cgi or Agora.cgi. They
can easily be installed on a server that has simple CGI/Perl
capabilities. To me, the important thing about these is that they do not
require anything special on the server to get them to work. They also
both store the data for the products in a file on the server, so they
are sort of like a database driven catalog.

With either JavaScript or Server Side catalog programs, basically what
you will be doing is learning to construct the web pages around custom
programming tags.

Leaning on something simple, like the two aforementioned programs, will
give you the skills to be able to evaluate future catalogs.




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Jim Tom Polk - Camalott Web Team     | For Tech Support...
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Jim Tom Polk -:- jtpolk(at)texas.net -:- http://camalott.com/~jtpolk/	
	''You might as well fall flat on your face as 
	  lean over too far backwards.''      --James Thurber--
   "The Universe is run by the complex interweaving of three 
          elements: energy, matter and enlightened self-interest." 
 		- G'Kar  "Survivors"                                  

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