Notes 6 for E-commerce

Goals:

Learn how to connect to a Shopping Cart

Know the "What to look for" in a Merchant Service

Watch & Read:

My Bribe site and Order Now uses Mal's.

Shopping Cart

With Forms you can "Get" or "Post" information to your server. You have the option of adding several "objects" to your HTML with the forms tag. Text boxes, Text Areas, Check Boxes, Radio Buttons and Submit Buttons are the more popular objects you can add to your page.

We will be interacting with a database at Mal's Website. Mal's database needs the following fields to be filled out for the shopping cart to work. Mal's website uses Cold Fusion to create the connection to his database

  1. userid     User Id for your shopping cart setup
  2. product    What is the product you are selling?
  3. price    Price of the Product you are selling
  4. qty    How many will the customer want to buy?
  5. Form Action     You will need to provide an action for this form to work. Mal will send you this URL when you register!

Merchant Services

When selecting a merchant service, make sure you kmerchantnow: Some services have multiple plans!

1. The monthly charges (if any.)

2. The yearly charges (if any.)

3. Minimum charge per transaction (if any.)

4. Percent of transaction charge (if any.)

5. How quickly you receive the money (how many days.)

6. What is your liability in case of fraud (complete, partial or no liability.)

7. What the merchant customer service policies of their service and how can you contact them.

8. The security measures the merchant services uses!

Chase's StoreFront

Interesting Concept Open Source Books

Shopping Carts are a form that allows you to track your customers purchases.

Mal's e-commerce, Google and PayPal are popular free Shopping carts. Amazon offers shopping cart services with their hosting service.

I recommend you use Mal's e-commerce shopping cart because the service is free and because of its tutorials. You can customize Mal's shopping cart so it looks like you never left your site.

 

 

 

Review the following:

Tutorial on accepting credit cards.

Check out American Express', Discover, PayPal merchant accounts

Credit Card Processing explanation.

Electronic Wallets : MS Passport ,& Liberty Alliance

Scam Busters has fraud advice

 

Terms you need to Lookup:

Merchant Account, Electronic Wallets, Transactions

 

Homework:

Reminder: Post your articles on Blackboard under the Weekly Articles on the Discussion Board Section.

Review: 3 Merchant Services for Homework and post your results on Blackboard. Create a table similar to the one you used in your host review except you would be wise to follow the criteria I identified above.

Sample

Merchant

Setup
Costs

Monthly
Fee

Transaction
Fee

Liability

Security

1 Name
Price
Price
Price
info
info
2 Name
Price
Price
Price
info
info
3 Name
Price
Price
Price
info
info

 

 

Final Step:

Review in your mind everything we covered in class and remember to cover it again before you go to bed so your mind to process this information while you sleep.