karen2205

What I'd intended to whinge about earlier was my difficulties in finding out what I need to do to enable online ordering for VF - there obviously needs to be some way for people to select items, input their personal details and then pay via a secure connection, but I haven't the faintest idea where to start because the information isn't easily googleable. Grr.

At the very least people who provide Merchant Services ought to explain how their systems for accepting online card payments work on their websites.

If I had that, then we could allow people to order what's currently listed on the website without too much difficulty - though query difficulty in working out how to get/store the information about them and what they want.

Before we move to having fabric online I suspect I'm going to need to learn how to give the website a database backing - something I know nothing about.

And I'm having far too many 'oh boy the world is suddenly smaller shocks' at the moment. Stop. It's disturbing.

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The world is this -->.<-- big.

*nods* - next I'm going to find out you know old school friends of mine or something:-)

I've twice encountered schoolfriends-of-friends as colleagues, so far.

Well, the simplest method is simply have an order form, that's POSTed via an https URL.

Something like a listing all your items in a table, and then getting them to fill in required quantities, POST it to a CGI script that then pulls out the details yuo're after.

Or you could go for clever, and basically fill in their entries and cookie it. (I never really got on with cookies, I try and track through server side session id's). Once they say 'yeah ok' then generate a form including what they want to order, and a 'fill in card details' entry, and again, POST that to a secure server.

One caveat is that it'll be necessary to acquire a certificate from Thawte or Verisign or similar.

Those are the simplistic ones, that'll probably require manually processing the order (eg. running it through on a card machine etc).

The reason they're no huge amounts of info available, is because online commerce products sell for large amounts of dosh. And they're a potential minefield - you have a duty of care as soon as anyone starts sending you financial information.

I'm sure that I've seen the topic discussed (in abstract form) on Perl Monks (http://www.perlmonks.org).

I've tried 'smart arse' stuff in Perl, but I've yet to play with things like PHP in anger, so YMMV.

Yeah - the problem is that all of this stuff currently reads like gibberish to me - it's totally beyond my current technical abilities.

I think I may well be better off starting from the beginning and learning how to write Perl/Java/PHP(?)/Python/C etc properly and then working out how to do it from there.

Unfortunately, most online shopping thingyies seem to require CGI scripts at some point.
Personally, I'd recommend perl, because I think it's great. But all the others _should_ do the job.

(basically, as long as you can run it, then you can use it as a CGI).

But yes, CGI is a 'new' thing, after getting used to writing HTML/PHP etc. It's a very different paradigm. (hoho. I got that into a comment)

I'd been more or less planning on going for perl for it - but we'll see when I know how to write it etc.

And yes, it's different and learning it won't be easy, but I'll manage.

These things are tremendously difficult. That's not to say "so hard that you can't do them", because you may well be able to do them in practice after a considerable amount of work and you may very well be better at this sort of thing than me. :-) Nevertheless, they are difficult to implement and the standard solutions that exist tend to be pretty expensive, aimed at reasonably big businesses.

You might consider being an amazon zshop or using Yahoo!'s similar shopping facilities as a reasonably accessible way to solve the problem, but at a very considerable cost to flexibility (as well as likely a siginificant financial cost too).

Good luck!

*Nods* - this is definitely a long term plan, not anything that can be done overnight.

Will look into the Amazon/Yahoo things - though I'm not sure they'll be appropriate/professional enough, they might be a good short term solution....

Have a chat with

nadnad - he did the Vags site, including the secure server stuff for online ordering. (You are going to use a secure server, aren't you...?)

Thank you - will do.

I was planning on using a secure server - even though I've absolutely no idea how to do that.

OK

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