At 9:08 PM -0400 2/16/99, Charlotte Entrepreneurs Online, Inc. wrote:
>This may prove to be "the dumbest question" in the history of this
>list...but I really need to be enlightened!
>
>I have clients who are selling large quantity of products online. These
>products and/or prices change frequently. These clients are getting buried
>in orders that are being placed from shoppers "favorite places" and/or
>"bookmarks". Thus, the product and/or prices are no longer valid. These
>clients are then having to check and re-check (because of the huge volumes
>of products) validity on each and every order (some are as high as
>200/day)...not to mention the shoppers are "disenchanted" when they find out
>they placed an order for an invalid product and/or price!
>
>Now I know my clients are nothing more than needles in the haystack of
>ecommerce. How are the "big guys" handling this problem? For that matter,
>how is anyone selling product online addressing this issue? Volume, or not,
>information changes.
The "big guys" handle this problem by putting all their content into
back-end databases and generating the pages from templates that pull the
appropriate data out. That way the templates may stay the same but the data
is always current. The most common tools for this type of work are probably
Microsoft ASP, ColdFusion, and UNIX tools such as mSQL.
>My initial thought was placing notices on the site to encourage people to
>refresh, frequently. Well, if they are pulling an old page from
>cache...this effort is mute! Yes, eventually these notices may weed out
>most of this situation...but what about AOL users? I've used AOL in the
>past and found "refresh" to be absolutely useless! And, will users follow
>the instructions to refresh, anyway?
>
>If there is a very simple solution...please be gentle in "giving it to me".
>I will beat myself up more times than you can imagine!:)
One idea might be to include in your pages the Refresh META tag. It would
go like this:
1. Suppose the page name is booklist.html
2. The META tag would be coded as:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="1;URL=booklist.html">
<TITLE>blah blah blah</TITLE>
</HEAD>
This would tell the browser to automatically refresh the page 1 second
after loading. It would be kind of annoying to folks, to be honest, but it
would force the reload and it would work on most browsers.
But to be honest, if your customer is serious about selling online, they
should probably look into a database driven approach.
Hope this helps.
-- Gary
---------------------------------------
Gary T. Almes, Words In Progress
voice: 410-515-9714 fax: 410-515-0091
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
web: http://www.wordsinprogress.com
ICQ: 13464614 AIM: GaryTAlmes
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