Forum Moderators: buckworks
I've seen two from a two different 3rd party developers, but they don't seem to be robust enough. We're looking to put probably 4 to 7,000 products online.
you haven't given much detail there. the more details you give, the easier it'll be for people here to give you advice.
i've never used accpac software, so i don't know how whether the accounting software you use includes your shopping cart or anything else. could you be more specific about this?
have you looked at the accpac plug in web store system as advertised on the accpac website? which other e-commerce packages have you looked at?
I found a company called MindBuilder the other day. Their softare is claimed to be Real-time and transmit data between the accounting server and the web server via HTTP through using ASP and DLLs.
i'm not sure what mindbuilder is supposed to do, but again it looks like much the same thing with no card processing built in. can you install DLLs on your server? remember that if you take credit card numbers etc, then you should use HTTPS rather than HTTP.
can accpac export data to a database such as access, oracle, dbase, mysql, etc? if so, then you could use a shopping cart built in any of the standard server side scripting languages (ASP, Perl or PHP) and integrate with one of the many real time credit card processing companies.
It seems that the version of AccPac you have runs on Visual FoxPro 6. Thats ODBC compliant, so it should be easy enough to extract information from the a/c database. I don't know anything about how AccPac controls writing back information though. If their own e-comm package uses e-mail exchanges, its probably a bit fraught. You may end up looking at a custom job here
Do you have c/card merchant agreements in place? If so then you just need a secure cart system. If not then you may want to look at some of the on-line authorisation packages. WorldPay isn't bad, and I've seen a thread here [webmasterworld.com] all about it
Alernatively, if you just want to allow credit account customers to order, then you just need a system that controls what products they see, and what prices for those products
I've Sticky'd you some details of the e-comm packages I deal with, let me know if you want more details
I need to look into MindBuilder to see if they send information via normal HTTP or via HTTPS. MindBuilder can do CC verification.(I read this somewhere but I can't find it this morning)
Also, any communication between the web server and the accounting server WOULD NOT go over the interenet, but on our LAN instead.
TallTroll, I didn't get an stickynotes.
here is their diagram:
[mindbuilder.com...]
Here is what they state on security:
Security
The communication between the web server and the accounting server is accomplished via the
HTTP protocol. It is assumed that the web server will be maintained outside the firewall and the
accounting server will be maintained inside the firewall for maximum security (see diagram).
Both servers will need to run IIS 4.0. Requests from the web server to the accounting server will
be handled through standard URL addressing, for example
[accounting.yourcompany.com...] The accounting server returns text data via
the mbemerchant.dll, which is then stuffed into an ADO record set on the web server for
processing and dynamic HTML presentation.
the only real problem i can see will be that shopping cart script. i've only ever found one ASP shopping cart script which was free and wouldnt be suitable for the number of products you want to sell. there may be other scripts out there that will do the job you need.
