RE: OT: Off the shelf online order processing

["Mark Hetherington \(egroups\)" <mark.egroups@xxxxxxx>]

> I know this has nothing to do with HA, but does anyone have any
experience
> of off the shelf online order processing solutions. I have a potential
> client for a web site that will be built using ASP and SQL
> Server, they say
> they don't want to have any online shopping....yet. But they have
asked me
> to price up the possibility for a later addition to the site. It is
really
> only the actual secure processing of the order and payment that would
ever
> be required, the actual catalogue and order build would be handled
through
> the rest of the site. I have seen a few sites (for example comfort)
that
> have some form of third party add in or link out to handle this sort
of
> thing and just wondered if anyone know much about them. right now I
just
> need a ball park cost and indication of how solutions might work (for
> example would it be a package installed on the client's server,
> or would it
> be a link to a third party server). Please let me have any advice or
> comments.

Costs vary depending on the final solution since it can involve more than
one third party.

It is often cheaper to source your own secure environment and develop or
source a "shopping cart" program to handle the payments. The only
advantage
in paying for the thrid party solution is if they offer insurance against
fraud. Credit Card fraud is very bad for retailers since they lose the
goods
and the money even if they check the card out before purchase and are given
authorisation. Some third party credit card processing companies will
insure
against this and take the burden of this possible loss themselves. If they
don't then it is not worth the money.

Third party payment processing usually runs on their server and you merely
pass sufficient information to them for them to handle the payment part so
the "checkout" portion of the shopping cart redirects to their
site and may
optionally return to yours at any one of a number of stages.

> On a related point, the client is under the mistaken belief that they
are
> going to get loads of people finding them through search engines. I
have
> tried to explain how these tools are very difficult to 'tame' and that
it
> can be very much hit and miss getting on them at all, let alone
anywhere
> near the top. I have a feeling I know the answer to this, but is there
any
> approach other than applying for listing through the search site
> forms that
> might speed up or enhance a listing. I know about meta data, keywords
in
> title, URL and text etc etc and also to avoid what might be seen as

Search engines, no chance. The only way to succeed these days in a search
engine is sell somthing very rare that has little competition or pay for
the
better entries and more deciated engines and get in on the category early
(e.g. Just35).

To help with ratings, cheap (i.e. free) tricks are along with those you
mention, having a keyword in the URL and ensuring the title contains the
keywords and the text of the initial page references every on of the meta
search references in a non-redundant way. I.e. a site with meta tags
"home
automation X10" that never references them in text on the initial page
will
likely be thrown out by the engines and never listed at all. If you merely
add a paragraph in bg colour on bg colour, the search engine will again
reject since it sees them as repeats. Meta tags must never re use a keyword
so "home home automation" flag home twice and can cause
rejection. Do not
use commas since these reduce the total length of meta tags, are ignored by
most engines and will prevent some from indexing the site at all.

With most search engines the system scores as follows:

1) URL is the highest scoring part of the search. I.e. homeautomation.com
will always beat companyname.com regardless of traffic and how carefully
the
site has been configured to match search engine requirements. A trick to
use
from this is to have keywords as pages within the site.
www.homeautomation.com/homeautomation.htm will score highly as will
www.homeautomation.com/homeautomation/homeautomation.htm.
2) <title> use it well. No Welcome to Blah Ltd. Long sentence up to
the
limit that has useful keywords.
3) Meta tags. But make sure they are used in the page and the site or the
site will be thrown out for SPAM tags.
4) Finally content. Make sure the keywords used in the Meta tags and title
are used wherever possible. If there is a chance to get one on a page, do
it.

Traffic will affect the position of the site to some degree, but this is
way
down the line from even being listed.

One new trend as uses become more internet savvy is for people to type
www.whatiwant.com before they even bother with the very commercial and
often
useless search engines. So buy up any related URL that is free and direct
it
to the main site.

My advice is tell him to treat it like the real world and simply advertise.
Online advertising and links will get more benefit than any search engine.
Traditional media advertising will be what actually gets the hits. Just
having the URL on all company marketing material will attract more users
than any other method.

His biggest problem is that since he is likely to have a lot of ASP pages,
even if he gets the search engines to even look at the site they will not
see any HTM(L) files and so they will not get indexed. Limiting synamic
content is a must since all server side generated files are imediately
ignored. A search engine looks for any .htm or .html throughout the site
where it is allowed to go and will only index those. So he should
intersperse the site with sufficient static content to get a look in.

Hope some of that is useful, I haven't looke dinto it much <G>

Mark.


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