How does Mercantec SoftCart Shopping Cart Program Work?

by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson

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I'll be describing how the Mercantec SoftCart^TM 2.0 is designed.

Assigning a Unique Number

SoftCart stores assign a unique shopping cart number when you enter the store, made up of 4-alpha and 4-numeric characters, such as btrx1947. Some programs use "cookies." However, a small but increasing number of shoppers are setting their browsers to reject "cookies." Another alternative is to identify the shopper by his ISP's IP number. But what if you have two shoppers in the store at the same time from a popular ISP such as America Online? Though AOL users don't all have the same IP number, there's the possibility of confusion. SoftCart's StateTrack^TM system is best.

This illustration shows Mercantec SoftCart in relationship to other aspects of on-line purchasing.
(Graphic © Mercantec, Inc. Used by permission)

Confirming the Customer's Location.

When your customer gets ready to place an item in the shopping cart, SoftCart will ask the location. This serves two purposes:

1. Distance to determine shipping charges
2. State of residence to determine whether sales tax needs to be collected.

For our demo store in California, for example, we allow several categories:

• California (sales tax)
• Oregon, Washington, and Nevada
• Alaska and Hawaii
• Other states in the US
• Mexico and Canada
• Other countries

You can make this as simple or complicated as you need to.

Calculating Shipping Charges

The SoftCart allows you a great deal of flexibility in deciding how to calculate shipping charges. You can use:

• Price threshold, such as "Shipping on orders under $25 is $3.50, $50 to $100, $5.75, etc.
• Weight tables. In this case you designate a weight for each product. The program totals the weight and figures shipping charges based upon weight (and distance if you like).
• Quantity threshold. "One to three books are shipped free. Four or more books are charged $2.00 per book." You get the idea.
• Line item. You may want to designate a particular shipping charge for each item. SoftCart allows you to do that, too.
• No calculation. You may not want to calculate shipping on-line. I have a client that calculates actual shipping charges and adds this to the invoice. Perhaps you ship your product via FTP or e-mail and don't have shipping charges. You can easily disable this feature.

Calculating Taxes

Who wants to talk about taxes? But sales tax is a fact of life unless you live in Nevada or some other such state. If you just have to charge 5% to any purchaser in your state, that's pretty straightforward. But SoftCart lets you specify different tax rates to different areas, and specify which pay tax based on the purchase price, and which pay tax on the purchase price and shipping charges, too. (Someone ought to vote those legislators out of office!) At any rate, you've probably concluded by now that SoftCart has a pretty sophisticated system of calculating these things.

Databases

SoftCart works from several databases which it refers to for every shopper. You've probably guessed by now what they are, and feel free to take a look at the actual tables for this Demo Store:

• Shipping
• Weight tables (optional)
• Taxes
• Product. This includes a product number, two or three word description, price (and weight if you desire).

The product database can include just a few products -- 25 to 50 -- or many thousands of products. It works fast and efficiently no matter what size it is.

An overview of SoftCart's internal operation. (Graphic © Mercantec Inc., used by permission)

In addition, the SoftCart can use its own product database or any ODBC compliant database to insert dynamic prices and other elements into existing Web pages. This way store prices can be updated simply by uploading a new database rather than laboriously rekeying all the Web pages by hand.

Checkout

Any time someone puts an item in their cart, wheels whir (not really, that's just a figure of speech), the shopping cart program checks its various databases, and the customer's screen displays all the things the customer has placed in the cart so far, including tax, shipping charges, and a grand total.

When your customer is ready to check out, purchases appear at the top of the order page. There are also options to print out the completed order form on your customer's computer printer, or have it e-mailed to the customer for phone, fax, or snail-mail ordering.

Receiving Orders

When your customer orders on-line, the order is automatically placed in a file directory on your Internet Service Provider's computer. Every day, or more often if you like, you the merchant can check this directory for orders and print them out or download them to your computer. (You can have them e-mailed to you if you desire, being careful to encrypt those order messages to prevent any security breach in transit.)

Credit Card Authorization and Accounting Integration

The better shopping cart programs also provide a way to invoke real-time on-line credit card authorization. They also all you to input order information directly into your desktop accounting software.

That's pretty much it. While a simple Web page form is capable of taking an order for a product, to set up an easy-to-shop, easy-to-maintain functioning retail store you'll need a shopping cart program.

I hope I haven't confused you, though if you are thinking about setting up an on-line store you'll have to know about all these things. The most important person to keep un-confused, however, is your customer. And programs like SoftCart do a good job of making shopping simple and hassle-free.

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