Hi Jack,
btw, the client talked with the NewGate people and was very impressed. She
very much appreciated your referral. Unfortunately it doesn't sound as if
the boss has money to spend on promotion until after some revenue starts
coming in. The old catch 22. This is shaping up as one of those 'Champagne
tastes, beer pocketbook' clients.
>
>What type of server are they on?
Currently they're on a Unix box but my guess is that we'll move them to an
NT server.
>
>Are they currently using a database on the server to save order records, or
>are they just writing to a file? If they are writing to a file, is a copy of
>the script being used available (sans any private info)?
We are starting completely from scratch, ground zero. No sales yet. Not
even any product 'til next month. The sample order that I showed was
actually one from another client (Shrapnel Records). I had showed the new
client this and said OK, this is the basic type of data submission that we
can set up at no extra charge. Then they started asking, "well, can it do
this? can it do that? blah-blah-blah" so now I'm trying to figure out how
to do make it jump through hoops--cheaply, of course. I'm pretty good at
making Photoshop jump through hoops, but databases and javascript are
[currently] a little out of my league. Another local company is offering to
set up their ecommerce using their licensed relationship with Merchant
Planet, which would give them realtime credit-card processing, but that
company wants a 20% commission on sales, a bit steep for the client,
especially when the credit card companies would also get 7%.
I've also been talking with Kathy Gill, who feels that ColdFusion is the
way to go. I don't know if the NT server I'm thinking of using has CF, but
am sure the owner would be happy to add it as CF is also a personal
interest of hers.
>
>> Also, the client wants the date of the order added automatically.
>> How would
>> one go about doing that? Can it somehow be done with the HTML
>> setup for the
>> form?
>
>Dependably, you want to get the time from your server and save it to your
>database or file when first saving the order. You could use javascript to
>get the time from the user's machine, but they may have no javascript
>ability, may have their time/date set wrong, etc...problems.
>
>Your form below looks like an email. Are the orders currently just being
>emailed to your client, or do they have some kind of web interface for
>viewing orders? If so, is the interface something developed in-house, or is
>it a third party (maybe the same one that does the credit card approval?)
>thing? If it's a third party thing, is this a copy of a typical order as you
>see it when you access the third party reports? If you're using a third
>party, do they provide any daily reports of all sales? Does the third party
>give you any options for selecting the format that you want to view your
>orders in? Do they provide any downloadable files, or just viewing of
>reports via the web?
Yes, it does look like an email form submission. But it's actually a form
posted to a password-protect ssl commerce server. This client (Shrapnel
Records) has to go into the web page and print out the forms each day.
Theoretically the client could ftp in to download the page, but I don't let
Shrapnel have ftp access to their own site because they are complete and
total computer idiots. This order happens to post a Mac server--it's a
simple system, no credit card approvals or anything fancy. No third party
software -- it's just a SimpleText page. All the orders are filled
"manually." I'm sure it could be more sophisticated, but Shrapnel wouldn't
be willing to pay us for the time to set up something better. The new
clients are much more sophisticated and are already doing their own updates
to their existing web site, so I'm confident that they could handle ftp'ing
without crashing the whole West Coast Internet (unlike Shrapnel). I just
need to figure out an inexpensive way to make their orders behave nicely.
thanks for all your help! Suz
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