Re: [cobalt-users] Shopping carts for Raq 4

[Paul Wilson <webguroo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday 14 October 2003 12:00 pm, Greg Hewitt-Long wrote:

> How is security a pain?  FreeSSL.com certificates can be purchased and
> installed in about 15 minutes flat.  You will need to have site that
> require SSL on their own IP address to accomplish this, but this is a piece
> of cake - contact your upstream about more IP addresses if required.  We
> use IP addresses fairly fast - each of our "business" package customers
> gets their own IP - this is recommended for anyone using ecommerce, or
> thinking of adding ecommerce in the near future.

 I wouldn't use FreeSSL anyway.  I have already had a bad experience with 
off-brand certs not working in all browsers.  A lot of digging found browser 
bugs to blame, but it was still a big problem when purchasers call 
complaining the certificate is bad when in fact it is not. I can't deal with 
angry store owners when something like this happens.  This was a saga and a 
whole other email.      

> Hosted carts are not a good solution in ANY way, shape or form unless you
> enjoy sending cash out the door.  The "cost" of adding a cart system to

There are many affordable carts out there.  If you had looked at coolcart you 
would have found that it is very affordable to set up, annually it can cost 
less than the price of many certificates.  $120 per year to start.

For a webmaster that has never set up a cart, spending days flailing around 
trying to figure out why they can't get a cart working can be more than worth 
the few dollars a cart would cost.  

With coolcart, you copy and paste a piece of cgi, make a few edits and it's a 
working shopping cart page.  

How much is it worth to get past the aggravation and get back to work doing 
the other things that need doing?  Not everyone knows that you need to use 
ascii upload and set permissions on configuration files. 

Even if they read about them somewhere, that does not mean they understand 
them or their ftp programs have the ability. You are assuming this guy has 
the same level of expertise that you have.  If they were asking questions 
like this, he probably doesn't have your expertise.

Finally, if the customer can't afford a shopping cart.  I am not sure I want 
to deal with them.  Will that final check clear the bank?  Are they going to 
stiff me?

I can get a coolcart setup in about ten minutes time.  I seriously doubt 
someone new to oscommerce could set it up in an hour or two.  It would take 
more time than that to read the docs.

As for the security being a pain.  There is more to it than a cert.  You also 
need a way to get the credit card data to the merchant that is secure.  Most 
merchants require someone to set them up with PGP or the like.  That's 
another 2 hour trip out to see the merchant to set up their computer and 
explain it.   Coolcart has a program they supply that handles this simply and 
easily. They download it from their email.  It also can use gateways.  All my 
customers prefer to handle this manually.

I am NOT selling coolcart and I don't get any perks for mentioning it.  Its a 
company I have used for years. We have a good relationship.  Americart is 
similar in most ways and also affordable.  Dansiecart is also an affordable 
commercial cart.

I looked at oscommerce, problem was it was pretty much a database driven cart 
and it didn't fit our way of building web pages.  We want 100% control of the 
look and feel and database driven carts make that more difficult.  Many of 
them end up looking like cookie cutter sites.  Thats not the look we strive 
for.  

There are also a  few proprietary things we do with a cart, and oscommerce 
gets in the way of that too.  


Paul Wilson
webguroo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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