eCommerce,

Twenty million people in North America now buy products and services via the Internet. Your Web site can offer your products and services to this vast market using either an on-line brochure or a shopping cart.

Let's look at "shopping carts".

All shopping cart programs fill out the order form detail lines automatically. There are three remaining functions that a cart must provide.

In a basic cart, product information such as catalog number, description and price is hard-coded into the HTML page that the user views. Changes to this information become more difficult as you increase the number of products or services you offer.

Shipping charges must be calculated manually by the customer in both types of basic shopping carts. A table of shipping charges is usually provided to help them perform this task.

In a basic cart, the completed order is Emailed to you. There is no other copy of the order or record of the customer. Customers who place repeat orders must re-enter all of their shipping and billing information for each order.

Even with these restrictions, the basic photo shopping cart is suitable for product lines that do not change often, where repeat business is not common.

The basic shopping cart can be enhanced by the use of standard text files, often called ASCII files. You might add two of these files to your system.

First, put all of your product information into an ASCII file and have your shopping cart use that file when it fills out an order. Now it will be relatively easy to change this information in the future. Note that you will still have to hard-code the product display pages and modify them by hand.

For an example of a basic on-line photo catalog that uses an ASCII product file, go to: http://www.bobshell.com

Follow the links to the store. This store is relatively easy to maintain and can be expanded very quickly. The actual shopping cart in use was provided free of charge by the Web hosting company.

Second, have the cart add the customer information to a second ASCII file. This will give you a means to quickly track down information about any orders, without having to dig through countless Emails. For security reasons, do not store credit card information in this file.

This type of store should meet the needs of most people with a limited selection of products.