Re: e-commerce

A few comments from someone who has been fighting the e-commerce learning
curve recently.

You need a cart compatible with your linux, which I'm not familiar with, but
assume will run a basic unix-perl script. After two months research this is
the best I've found, perl, open source, well documented:

http://www.careyinternet.com/cgi-bin/demo/store/commerce.cgi

Commerce.cgi is the name of the program; free. I'd suggest looking into
something like authorize.net for info on processing orders through a
merchant account, which you know you need. There are a lot of others, but
these folks seem to know what they're doing. The cart above is configured
for them, makes it a lot easier to get going.

http://www.authorizenet.com/

I'm sure you are looking more for an overview, but having spent so long
learning the stuff I'm reluctant to go over all the hiways and byways again.
I started from the : we need a cart. Then hunting for one to write on an
existing server, and rejected javascript in part because of the need for
frames, and the rather rigid structure of the java carts I tested, or the
rigid templates, or the template only structure of the cart.  Then, of
course, the whole issue of browsers that don't accept java. You get the
idea.

I was looking for something that was under $150 USD, so it rather limited
things. If you want to spend more, the Miva Merchant cart looks terrific.
Any search will find it for you. I don't think it's necessary to spend the
$1200 and up for many of the carts on the market.

Security is another key issue: do you have SSL on your server? Can you
reasonably assure customers privacy? Will you want to process orders in real
time or off line?

And, chuckling, is this enough to get you started? There are some good
tutorials out there -- again, a search will net you a cart full. Google is
great for this kind of search. Very good specificity.

Specificity being something I'm a little short of tonight --

Kathy

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