Shopping Cart
HERMES Shopping Cart is a collection of programs installed on our
www server for use by members who would like to create and
maintain a simple on-line shop on their web sites.
To use the shopping cart, one has to:
- configure the shopping cart programs according to the way one wants shopping requests to be processed,
- include references to the shopping cart programs on pages where items
or services offered for sale are presented.
Configuration
Configuration begins at http://www.hermes.net.au/form-bin/conf.cgi. It involves filling out
several
forms, one by one, on which the following information is required:
- shop name as it will be displayed to visitors,
- location of the main page where visitors start shopping,
- background color of the cart forms,
- tax percentage, if to be applied to prices,
- how shipping charges are to be calculated and what they depend on
(number of items, their weight, or cost), if any,
- forms of payment, i.e. cheques, postal money orders, direct transfers,
cash on delivery, etc,
- text displayed at the end of successful transactions.
Initially configuration program displays certain default values that one can modify. They may be
re entered and repeated any number of times, each time values entered last time become defaults this time.
Since your browser is the only interface to the configuration of the
shopping cart, please bear in mind that any changes take effect only by
pressing 'Submit and continue'. In other words, your choices and values
of various fields do net get through to the server until 'Submit and
continue'.
All configuration items have their default values displayed when you
run the configuration process for the first time, and when you press
'Reset'
at any time. One item, 'backgroung color', affects not only the forms
displayed to the visitors of your site, but also consecutive forms of
the configuration, thus allowing you to test the effect immediately. To
change the color, you may use names as defined in html, eg. white,
silver, tan, etc., or their hexadecimal values, eg. #d0d0d0.
References to shopping cart in web pages
Suppose one has a web page presenting and offering for sale on-line a
leather bag for $32.15. The page contains its description, photo, and
one line consisting of the bag price, a slot where a visitor may type a
number of bags
he/she wants to buy and a button 'Add to Cart'. The following html code
implements such a line:
<p>
<form method=post
action="/cgi-bin/cart.cgi?user=user_name+command=add">
Price $32.15 Quantity
<input type=hidden name="itemname" value="Leather bag">
<input type=hidden name="itemprice" value="32.15">
<input type=text size=2 name="itemquant" value="1">
<input type=submit value="Add to Cart">
<p>
where:
- user_name should be replaced by the actual user name of the web owner,
- itemname, itemprice, itemquant are names of the necessary inputs to
the program /cgi-bin/cart.cgi ,
- (non-breakable space) is just a formatting element.
If shipping charges depend on weight of items, an additional hidden input is necessary above, eg:
<input type=hidden name="weight" value="0.45">
where the value should be shown in kg.
A click on 'Add to Cart' has the effect of adding the specified number
of bags to the visitor's shopping cart,
displaying the cart content, and allowing the visitor:
- to change the
number of bags,
- to make purchase,
- to
go back to the site main page,
- or to empty the cart altogether.
If the
visitor uses the back button of his/her browser and clicks 'Add to
Cart'
again, the specified number of bags is added to the previous one in the
cart.
Apart from the forms like above, you may want to place the following reference on some pages of your site:
<a href="/cgi-bin/cart.cgi?user=user_name+command=review>
Cart content
</a>
Its effect is a link that, when clicked, displays the cart content
and allows the visitor to purchase, or to go back to your main page, or
to
empty the cart altogether and start again, as in case of pressing 'Add
to Cart'.
Please, note the non-standard separator '+' instead of '&' in query-strings.
How it works
As soon as a visitor to your web site clicks on a link or button
concerned with your shopping cart, a cart record is created on the
server and a cookie containing a pointer to that record is sent to the
visitor's browser. If the browser does not accept cookies, the visitor
will not be able to make any purchases. Therefore, you might wish to
include a warning to such an effect on the main page of your electronic
shop.
The cookie has an expiry time of one hour. It means the visitor has one
hour to conclude his/her shopping on your site. In the meantime, he/she
may visit other pages, or even disconnect and reconnect to the Internet
any number of times. If, however, it takes longer than one hour, the
visitor will be able to start his/her shopping from the beginning
rather than resuming it from the point he/she left off.
Once the visitor has pressed the link PURCHASE, our server
takes over the communication with the visitor's browser, and asks
questions about visitor's addresses and payment form. When all questions are answered, the purchase
confirmation page is displayed, that can be printed by the visitor as an
invoice/receipt, and in an e-mail message containing all details of the
purchase, sent by the server (Nobody) to the shop owner. At the same
time the cart record is removed from the server, i.e. no details of the
purchase are available any longer, except for the content of the e-mail
mentioned above. If the visitor goes back in his/her browser, makes
somes changes in his/her order or payment, and submits again, the next
page will inform him/her that the cart is empty, and he/she may start
shopping again from the beginning.