[Zope] Another Zope E-Commerce Site Online

[Brad Clements]

On 6 Dec 2000, at 23:54, Bill Welch wrote:

> Maybe you just looked at the catalog and didn't notice what's in the
> checkout. Having spent the past month setting up a site with Etailer, I
> would have to completely disagree with you. If Brad started with Etailer (I
> suspect he did, the checkout sequence has an Etailer look), it would have
> taken a lot of hard core programming, not graphical work, to get to where
> he is in 5 days.

I haven't looked at Etailer. I did download zCommerce for a look, but 
was concerned about using ZPatterns. I've used LoginManager and it 
works well, but the terminology used in ZPatterns always gives me a 
headache. Clearly a shortcoming on my part - if I could understand what 
it does I'd probably use it.

In the end, I already had the product database and the "shopping cart", 
so all I needed was the checkout sequence and cybercash charging.

The checkout sequence is based on pages that the web designer gave 
me, and she copied the design from someone else's site.

The nice thing about the checkout sequence is that you can move 
backwards at any time without losing the entered data. Also you can 
jump out to shop more, jump to the privacy, shipping and returns policy 
and your entered data isn't lost.

We of course don't keep the CC number info if you leave page 3 by any 
means other than "Purchase". But everything else is kept.

> 
> 1) Etailer doesn't support separate billing and shipping addresses
> 
> 2) ETailer doesn't support a shipping fee, much less shipping alternatives

Oih, shipping is a total headache with this site. The current shipping 
charge is based on a table by total purchase price. We really need to 
support actual charging by carrier/service/destination. That's simple to 
do but I ran out of time.

The big headache is that each product is likely shipped from a different 
"artisan", so the site owner encounters multiple shipping charges, but 
the customer really can only be charged once for shipping. 
> 
> 3) Etailer doesn't do taxes.

We have to charge tax for ship-to Zips in New York State. We use a tax 
table by Zip to get the tax rate.




Brad Clements,                bkc@murkworks.com   (315)268-1000
http://www.murkworks.com                          (315)268-9812 Fax
netmeeting: ils://ils.murkworks.com               AOL-IM: BKClements