E-commerce Resources (Web Developer's Journal). How to build online shopping sites. Tutorials on internet security, credit card merchant accounts, shopping cart software, and other electronic commerce help for home or small business.
eCommerce, Ecommerce, Electrionic Commerce, Web Commerce, whatever you want to call it, for us it's selling things over the Internet. You want to take orders on your Web site, your customers will pay for things with credit cards. It might be retail and it might be business-to-business.
We've assembled some articles and opinion pieces
that should help you find your way though the electonic commerce maze to get the
piece of cheese we hear is at the end.
Building
a Simple Ecommerce Web Site
You don't need to spend $millions to build an ecommerce
Web site. There are viable do-it-yourself alternatives at hand. These are cost
effective and require little technical expertise.
Tune
Your Ecommerce Site for the Rush
Christmas Rush, Easter Rush, Summer Rush or a bit
of brisk business next Friday. It doesn't matter when, the principles are the
same. Your servers and bandwidth have to be big enough. Your systems have to be
solid.
Is
SSL dead?
Most security experts have been aware of problems
with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), but they haven't been exploited extensively.
Chances are they will be, though.
Adding
A Dealer Locator To Your Site
Many large corporate Web sites have a "dealer locator"
feature that lets a user enter a zip code and get a list of the closest locations
to them. It turns out to be both cheap and easy to do.
Hey
wait! You didn't pay for that!
There's a dirty little secret about shopping carts: <whisper> most shopping
carts are abandoned full of merchandise before they ever get to the checkout counter!</whisper>
Find out how to reduce your abandonment rate.
Ecommerce
Tutorial
A detailed, three-part tutorial about how to set
up a simple ecommerce Web site.
Ecommerce
on a Budget
A simple, dependable, and inexpensive ecommerce solution
for small businesses is proposed.
E-commerce
in the UK
Multimillion pound savings are emerging from use
of the Web in the UK. Investment bank Schroders are looking to cut over one million
pounds from their annual buying costs. However, it's not all a smooth ride, as
Freeserve will confirm.
Do
the banks hold back E-commerce in the UK?
In the UK, doing business on the Internet is in
some ways still a frontier-town activity. The worst of the outlaws in this game
of Cowboys and Indians are the UK banks and credit card companies.
Shopping
Cart Programs Compared
Need a shopping cart? Here's an overview of your
options, from homegrown JavaScript to easy-to-implement turnkey solutions for
merchants.
NetObjects
Authoring Server Suite 3.0
NetObjects is shooting to alleviate the bottleneck
created when Webmasters are forced to do all the work of developing and deploying
Web content to Internet and Intranet sites.
EDI
as the Backbone of Electronic Commerce
Large and medium-sized companies have been doing business with each other electronically
for years via Electronic Data Interchange (EDI).
Toolkits
for a Distributed, Agent-Based Web Commerce System
This is an 8-part series. As information on the Internet
becomes more dynamic and heterogeneous, 'software agents' have been touted as
the new building blocks for a new Internet structure.
Ecommerce Environment
Why The Web Still Isn't Ready For Consumers
Despite early projections, consumers have not been overwhelming e-retailers with business. The questions we need to ask ourselves are why, and is there anything positive we can do to improve the situation?
Reducing
Online Credit Card Fraud
Credit card company figures show that 90 per cent
of consumers are reimbursed when their cards are used fraudulently, while 75 per
cent of online retailers have to eat the cost when they're the victims of credit
card fraud.
Gambling
Online And Offshore
Online betting and gaming revenues are predicted
to reach $10 billion by 2002. Interactive betting services are looking to attract
a new audience - the middle classes and women.
Dotcom
Bubble - "The Emperor Has No Clothes!"
Expect valuations in ecommerce companies and other
consumer business to go down even further. Somebody has noticed the Emperor is
nude and the stock market and venture capitalists are no longer prepared to pay
for his wardrobe.
You
Paid How Much For That Domain Name?
The domain name Business.com was recently sold for
a staggering $8 million. If you've got a domain name to sell, or you'd like to
buy one, where on the Internet should you start looking, and how much will it
be worth?
Archive
Electronic
CommerceBy Frank Griffel, Tuan Tu, Winfreid
Lamersdorf (editors)
Book review.
Web Commerce
Cookbookby Gordon McComb
Book review. Explains how to set up sites to sell
either tangible goods, or content. Includes a wealth of useful CGI scripts and
HTML templates.
Internet Commerceby Andrew Dahl and Leslie Lesnick
This is also a pretty comprehensive guide.
Frontiers
of Electronic Commerceby Ravi
Kalakota and Andrew B. Whinston
This textbook covers credit card systems, EDI, electronic
cash systems, security, and much more.
Electronic
Commerce - A Manager's Guide by
Ravi Kalakota and Andrew B. Whinston
WalkThrough Pro 2.0 for Windows (also available for the Mac) is first and foremost, an innovative 3-D navigation package. Models created in WalkThrough Pro 2.0 can be navigated in a totally freelstyle method by using the mouse alone or in combination with the ALT, SHIFT, or CTRL keys. Also provided with WalkThrough Pro is the freeware Virtus Player utility that allows users to share their model files with others and give the same walkthrough experience (by reason of a predefined animation path) or allow others to view things in their own “freestyle” path by using the same mouse/key functions, in that they can see things from bird’s eye or worm’s eye view as they see fit to move about themselves.
The possibilities for sharing ideas for all kinds of things architectural, mechanical, or virtually anything conceptual are endless. To me, that’s the primary reason for 3-D modeling in the first place. Now someone has brought walkthrough capability to the common computer desktop. Of course, smooth walkthroughs require fairly swift hardware (486, local bus preferred). WalkThrough Pro 2.0 is not the most powerful modeling software package I’ve come across, but it is useable and not a toy, capable of precision input.
Some of the features of WalkThrough Pro that I found to be remarkable for a visualization software package that costs $195 (formerly $595) are:
The ability to edit the inside of a surface independently from the outside of the surface, such as having the inside a different color or texture (called material in other software) from the outside.
The Velocity Grid, which is basically a set of vertical and horizontal ticks used while navigating to gauge the speed of walking and turning.
The user can navigate inside objects, or turn on collision detection and make walls and objects solid, and impervious to travel.
The ability to add handles to objects to allow reshaping. The ability to work with an isolated surface of an object to easily add features like windows.
Many, and I mean many, useful 2-D and 3-D objects are included; like furniture, appliances, stairs, windows, doors, people.
Tape deck like buttons for recording and playing a pre-defined walkthrough path in the shareable file.
The Tumble Editor, which can be used to expose hard to see surfaces for modification.
The ability to simultaneously change the dimensions (height or depth, for example) of multiple objects easily by use of multiple selection and the depth control gauge.
Linked textures. These are handled in much the same way as graphics linked to a word processor in Windows. This works great when you’re building your walkthrough world and constantly modifying texture image files, but can make walkthrough files large. However, an option to embed textures is available, and greatly reduces walkthrough file size, which by the way can be surprisingly small considering the visual worlds they provide. I found several very good walkthrough files on America Online as well as finding that the Virtus Player was also available there.
Plenty of different methods for applying textures, such as: fitting tiles, mirroring, using “decal” to make certain colors transparent (er... like a decal).
Tools for creating a custom credits screen, including a picture and text for your walkthrough file.
WalkThrough can export files in BMP, TIF, EPS, Illustrator, Animator Pro, and DXF 2-D or DXF 3-D (CAD) formats, and can import BMP, TIF, or DXF 2-D files as trace layers. Trace layers are just what they sound like; basically a backdrop that you trace over with WalkThrough Pro’s modeling tools. I personally feel that Virtus would make a lot more people happy if users could import 3-D models into WalkThrough that they had developed with their own modeling package, since (a) 3-D modeling is really still fairly complex and tedious to do for most people, and (b) learning more than one or maybe two modeling packages is fairly tall order for most people. Users could still use WalkThrough Pro’s tools for textures, lighting, and of course, walkthrough. I understand that this could be a tough issue to address, and in my correspondence with Virtus, it’s apparent that they’ve given it a lot of thought, and some effort. 3-D DXF translations that I’ve done between various packages have often had some shortcomings and even bizarre results, especially with splines and trimmed surfaces. Virtus tells me that they will probably have support for VRML out around the end of summer '95 and that efforts to use 3-D DXF imports are fairly halted.
Besides Virtus walkthrough files, WalkThrough Pro provides screen capture tools with several useful options (screen, design or walk view windows, etc.) and can create Animator Pro files as well as Windows AVI files.
Documentation The documentation provided contains an installation sheet, tutorial guide, user’s guide, and quick reference card. Since installation of the product, which comes on five 3.5 inch 1.44MB diskettes is very simple, the installation sheet will entertain you for about 5 minutes or so. It does have a “quick create” section which will have you creating a box and walking through it within seconds of completion of the software installation. The tutorial guide is quite good even if it does show Mac screens in most of the graphics (just keep an open mind, O.K.). It is not intimidating with only 94 pages, but may seem wordy to some people. If you can follow the text as well as trying to hurry through by looking at the pictures (like I find myself doing sometimes), I’d guess that most folks will finish the tutorial feeling like a power user.
The User’s guide is excellent, getting that grade because it covers all the tools, has a table of contents, glossary, and my personal favorite, an index. I usually ignore quick reference cards, but maybe I shouldn’t. This one is useful, with all tools shown and graphic examples.
Interface The user interface at first glance, will probably look like most Windows programs to most people, with menu bars and scroll bars. It’s difficult to describe with words how a human interacts with software to produce results, but essentially this is the WalkThrough Pro interface: Two views, one called the Design View, which is a 2-D drawing area where objects and models are created, and a Walk View, which displays a 3-D rendering of the objects drawing in the design view, and then allows the user to walk through and around objects. You navigate in the walk view by placing the cursor around the center crosshair and pressing the mouse buttons. The Observer represents your eyes in the walk view and is shown in the design view. Basically it provides another way of moving or turning in case you get lost in the walk view.
The toolbar contains the following tools
Editing tool to edit various characteristics of an object including rotating, locking, hiding, selecting, connecting and others.
Creation tools to determine polygon outlines of objects.
Object editor tools allow the user to alter lighting, surface features or shape of an object.
The Color bar displays the default color for new objects.
Opacity modifier tools determine whether an entire object or a selected surface is opaque, translucent or transparent.
Inflation (like projection in other software) modifier tools determine the inflation type, or 3-D shape, of an object.
Appearance modifiers determine whether an object will be flat or smooth-shaded.
Inflation distance gauge is the tool for defining the depth, or distance, that a 2-D polygon outline is stretched to create a 3-D object.
The Layers list is used to add an object or group of objects to a separate layer. This can also be used to change features like color on multiple objects.
Conclusion I think a visualization program, in order to be truly innovative, must meet a need, and be practical. WalkThrough Pro 2.0 meets this criteria. We are in the information age, and if information needs to be shown in three dimensions to give the receivers of information a clearer picture than the transmitter intended, than WalkThrough Pro 2.0 is a viable, useful, and yes, fun tool to use to meet this need. Virtus is on to something here.
