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php3-list | 199901

[PHP3] suddenly, e-comerce! (long-ish) From: Joshua S. Freeman (jfreeman <email protected>)
Date: 01/26/99

***Disclaimer*** I apologize in advance to the lists if there is anything
inappropriate about either the length or substance of this post....

A few months ago i began researching how we would put together
our in-house e-commerce solution for our corporate website.

I work for a software company that produces and sells 4 products. This
number is about to increase to 8 or 9 products. We currently sell these
products in stores all over the world, and we have them available for
purchase and shipment or download. The online purchasing (ship or
download) solutions are currently handled by Startek and Digitalriver.

The obvious drawback to using these vendors is that it costs us more money
and it takes folks off of our website... also, the e-commerce pages on
their websites don't look and feel like the rest of the pages on our site.

After my initial research, the word came down that I wouldn't have to
worry about putting together an e-commerce solution... the decision had
been made to outsource everything.

Today, about 4 weeks before a planned launch date, e-commerce is back on
my plate.

Fortunately, we have a very talented developer on staff who is going to be
working with me on the back-end/heavy lifting development of our
e-commerce solution.

Unfortunately, this person has numerous other responsibilities and, while
he has a good grasp of APACHE, LINUX, REDHAT SECURE SERVER, PHP and MySQL,
he has not, to my knowledge, worked on an e-commerce project if this scope
before.

Our environment consists of:

redhat linux running on a powerful dell box...

redhat secure server, with a thawte certificate

apache

php

mysql

... for the most part we're running the latest and greatest released
versions of each of these products.

We'd like, as much as possible to stay with free/shareware solutions.

One assumption that *can* be made is that we do *not* intend to do
shrinkwrapped product fulfillment ourselves. We will outsource it to
Startek. I know this will affect things like credit card
verification/charging/inventory issues.

One assumption I cannot make is whether or not we will fulfull electronic
downloads of our software after online purchase is made... I guess this
raises questions about credit card verification/charging as well (not
inventory, obviously!)

Please correct me if I'm wrong about the following assumptions:

o we need to create a database in mysql to contain information about
  products, customers, shipping options, inventory information, and
  financial information.

o we need to also create (or locate/purchase/install) a shopping cart
program... I assume this would absorb the first item above... a kind of
hybrid package containing some db building scripts and some php3 code to
interact with the mysql db...?

Please answer the following questions:

In regards to the pricing of product, we will DEFINITELY have
situations where we may run promotions such that a certain product
may be sold for different prices to different customers. I'm
thinking that we would use something like a priority code field
and some kind of if/elsif logic to say "if the priority code is
this, show this price, if it is this, show this price, if there is
no priority code, show this price"...

Does this make sense?

Assuming we locate, purchase and install a good shopping cart solution
utilizing php and mysql, and assuming that we're *not* handling
shrinkwrapped product fulfillment, what are the pros and cons around
whether WE handle CCV (credit card verification) or STARTEK handles it
when we send them completed orders?

If WE handle it... how is this done? (I know about cybercash and
CCVS....)

Regarding fulfillment of purchase for electronic delivery of software...
is it correct to assume that if we handle this we MUST therefore handle
credit card verification/charging?

Also, if we handle electronic download... how is security handled around
this? i.e. how do we make sure that only people who have PAID have the
ability to download our software?

Can we put a time limit on their ability to do so? How?

Also... what if their ISP shuts them down mid-stream (mid-download)...
what mechanisms can we put in place to make it possible for them to pick
up their download where they left off once they re-connect?

I hope these questions are clear... I hope they are COMPREHENSIVE!!!

Please, if you think of anything I'm leaving out while reading this,
please let me know!

I look forward to your answers/suggestions/pointers/offers of help...
etc...

:)

         -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-
           Joshua S. Freeman | preferred email: jfreeman <email protected>
                 pgp 5.0 public key: finger jfreeman <email protected>
                          http://www.threeofus.com
                 -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+- 

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