WLLS 102 Class 135/7/2004

Professor C. Shilepsky

Wells College

E-Commerce

• Why are we considering this in "Writing for WWW?"

• Go over study questions

• Some ways people make $$$– Advertising placement fastclick.com

– Affiliate programs linksynergy.com

– Selling a service or product

Setting up a site

• Free hosting: geocities.com and others– url is www.geocities.com/yourname– advertising

• Commercial hosting option: http://ipowerweb.com – url is www.youname.com– cost: ~$96 per year

• Getting noticed– Register your site with search engines – Wait for Google to find and index it– Formerly more important: meta tags in the header

<meta name="description" content="Soaps R Us sells novelty soap...">

<meta name="keywords" content="soap, novelty, ...">

Setting up a shopping cart

• Payment example: PayPal– Accounts allow:

• individuals to pay for goods and services

• merchants to receive payment from an individual– Anyone can set up an account at www.paypal.com

• Shopping cart software: example

• Client comfort – Which is more risky, handing your card to a waiter or

ordering a book from Amazon?

– Fact: people are becoming used to electronic transfers

Transaction ProcessingCredit card validation

– Is the card number the right length?– Does it pass a checksum test?

• Double the value of every other digit starting with the next-to-rightmost digit.

• If any of the resulting values has more than two digits, then add the digits together to produce a single digit.

• Add the sum of all the digits not doubled in step 1 to the sum of all the digits from step 2.

• The result must be exactly divisible by 10

– Can be done on the client

Debit authorization – Does the account permit the payment?– Done by the server, using other internet services

Delivery

• Mom and pop: pack it up and ship it out.• High end: order is automatically forwarded to a

shipment center