Review: Dansie Shopping Cart 3.27

Dansie Shopping Cart 3.27
http://www.dansie.net/cgi-bin/referral.pl?id=wilsonweb.com
Dansie Website Design
98-718 Moanalua Rd #101
Pearl City, Hawaii 96782
$150

If you're a do-it-yourselfer, you'll probably like what you see in Dansie Shopping Cart, a very adaptable CGI e-commerce program that entails some HTML smarts, but doesn't require any programming knowledge of Perl. Of the popular shopping cart programs I've looked at in detail, it seems most similar to Americart (www.Americart.com), except that it is installed on the merchant's own server.

Installed on Your Server

Installation is relatively easy so long as you have permission to run CGI scripts on your server. (For $50, the software developers will install the program for you.) Of course, a Dansie online store requires fees for hosting, a payment gateway, and a merchant account (unless you use PayPal). But compared to programs that assess a monthly charge or a percentage of your sales revenue, Dansie can be run for a relatively low cost. A mall license is $650, which allows any number of stores to be run off of a single program. Dansie is a Perl application that runs on various flavors of Unix as well as Windows 95/98/NT.

Configuration File

The key to Dansie's adaptability is a detailed configuration file that governs exactly how the program will work -- from e-mail addresses and file locations to language settings and shipping calculations. In all, the configuration file is quite complex, containing 12 host variables, 81 store-specific variables, 14 secure server variables, and 12 flatfile database variables. The cart comes with detailed set-up instructions that you'll need to refer to as you work through each of these configuration options. You edit this as a text file and upload it to the server. While it's not simple, it doesn't take a genius to understand, and it gives you a great deal of flexibility to direct how your ordering system works. Unfortunately, Dansie's configuration file isn't nearly as easy to set up as Americart's, which is prepared using an online form, complete with explanatory comments.

Dansie can be adapted for a great variety of languages and alphabets. The lang.dat file specifies all the wording used in the shopping cart, order form, and order processing system. Since the configuration file allows you to set the Meta tag "Content Type" for various character sets, Dansie is able to display Latin, Russian, and Arabic alphabets, as well as double-bit languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Order Buttons

The handiest way to use Dansie is with order buttons that can be pasted into HTML pages within your existing website. Much like PayPal and Americart, hidden form fields are used to describe products and allow a number of purchasing options.

Products can be set up with multiple options (such as size, color, and material), each of which can increase the price, if desired. Of course, options don't have to alter the price, but think of the added flexibility! A basic tie-dyed T-shirt might cost $15, but with an attached hood (add $5), long sleeves (add $5), and wearer's embroidered name (add $5), the selling price could automatically calculate to $30.

The most common and flexible way to set up order buttons is with an HTML form and "submit" button. Here's an example:

But you can also set these fields up as an HTML hyperlink, such as:

The ability to contain product data within a hyperlink means that you to place order-URLs within HTML newsletters -- or even text newsletters, if a shorter redirect URL goes first to a redirect script. (Of course, you can include submit buttons within forms, too, but not all e-mail programs can execute them.) You can see some of the display capabilities in a demo page on Dansie's site (www.dansie.net/demo.html).

Product Database

At the basic level, Dansie Shopping Cart doesn't need an online product database, since all the product information can be included in an order button or hyperlink. But stores with scores or hundreds of products get pretty cumbersome when built by pasting order buttons into webpages.

You can set up a product database that contains all the essential information and options available for each product, laid out in a flatfile text database such as:

In conjunction with (1) a product search engine and (2) an HTML product template that shows where various fields should be displayed, Dansie Shopping Cart can create dynamic product webpages on the fly. For example, the search engine could be configured to search for all items that match "category = girl's tights", allowing you to set up a system of hierarchical menus in a larger store.

The ability to build a store from a product database means that you can maintain your store on a desktop application such as Microsoft Access, export it as a pipe-delimited text file, and upload the product file to the website when changes are made. It is also possible to run Dansie from an online MySQL database rather than from text files.

Shipping Calculation

Dansie allows for a number of shipping calculation methods, but doesn't include the UPS plug-in offered in more and more shopping carts. For many merchants, the best approach will be to designate a weight for each product, enter in the configuration file the shipping cost of the first pound, and then enter the cost for each subsequent pound. Calculation methods include:

1. Total weight of all the items (as described above)
2. Flat fee per item
3. Flat rates (or percentages) at various increments of the subtotal, such as "under $100, 5%," "$500 to $1,000, 2%," etc.
4. Custom shipping tables
5. No shipping

Alternatively, individual products can be marked as having no shipping cost. Dansie's flexibility allows shipping options for just about any conceivable situation.

Tax Calculation

The tax calculation is pretty straightforward. You can enter the sales tax percentage for each state in which you must collect tax, which Dansie will automatically apply to state residents. Unfortunately, Dansie does not allow merchants to indicate whether their particular state calculates sales tax on the subtotal, or on the total including shipping and handling charges.

Payment Methods and Gateways

Dansie allows a number of payment methods, with room for some not yet invented. Possibilities include:

1. Credit card transaction made via telephone
2. Secure online credit card transaction
3. Online check draft
4. COD
5. Check or money order sent by mail
6. Auxiliary payment options, such as PayPal

Merchants can also set a minimum order amount to keep transaction totals high enough to be profitable.

Dansie is set to connect with more payment gateways than any other program I've seen. These include: Authorize.net, VeriSign PayFlow Link (not Pro), WorldPay (many currencies), NetBanx (UK), Bank of America eStores, Cambist, CardService International (Clear Commerce), CubeCard, eProcessingNetwork, eWAY, gochargeit.com, GORealtime E-commerce Transaction Processing, InternetSecure, iTransact, PayPal, PayReady.net, PSiGate, SECPay, SecureHosting.com, SecurePay.com, and SkipJack.

Picking Up Orders

Dansie provides several ways to get orders to the merchant. Order information can be written automatically into an online order file (tracking.dat) that can be downloaded securely and imported into a desktop program. Since some payment gateways don't return the shopper from the credit card processor's website to the shopping cart, data can be written before it is sent to the processor (in a file named pending.dat), but not all the entries in this file will represent completed orders.

Dansie is also capable of encrypting order information at the webserver using PGP, and then e-mailing the encrypted order to the merchant, who then decrypts on his desktop computer.

Other Features

Dansie Shopping Cart contains a number of other features that merchants will find useful, including percentage discounts based on the order total, as well as coupon discounts. The program can keep track of remaining items in stock and reduce the inventory count after every sale.

Dansie can also be used to sell digital products. Products can be configured so that after an order has been processed, the program will automatically generate and e-mail to the purchaser random passwords, and then append their e-mail address and password to an .htpasswd file on the server, allowing access to protected directories. The most recent versions of the program can automatically remove expired email addresses and passwords from the .htpasswd file after a specific number of days.

The program also includes a crude referral system that identifies each order made by means of an "affiliate" link, though no affiliate management system is included. However, Dansie is fairly easy to set up with any affiliate tracking program that uses IMG tag calls in the "thank you" screen.

Pros and Cons

Dansie Shopping Cart is a well-tested and popular program, priced to appeal to do-it-yourselfers on a limited budget. Its flexibility allows a merchant to sell a huge variety of retail products requiring a variety of options, shipping parameters, etc. If you've had trouble finding a program that can display all your products' optional features, then look carefully at Dansie. Users rating the script on the CGI Resource Index commonly mention the high quality support offered to those who purchase the script (http://cgi.resourceindex.com/detail/01711.html).

Dansie's weaknesses are in merchant ease-of-use. There is no online wizard that holds your hand as you configure the store. Nor do you find pre-built templates that can be selected from a menu. Dansie requires skill in HTML. A website developer who builds a Dansie store for a client, does not free the client to maintain the store himself through a back-office web interface. The client must learn HTML and FTP, since adding products takes place either by adding records to a database which is uploaded to the server, or by pasting and configuring HTML order buttons into standard webpages.

A related weakness is the lack of an adequate order management system. Most merchants will need to either download order files and import them into another system, or retype information from e-mail order notifications. Dansie doesn't offer key features needed by B2B stores, such as a customer's order interface, discounts by classes of members, buyer registration, etc. Dansie Shopping Cart is focused clearly on retail sales.

But Dansie holds a lot of appeal to merchants who are selling only a few products, or those who have the HTML and database skills to use other tools to prepare product data and fulfill orders. For what it purports to be -- an order-taking front-end -- Dansie Shopping Cart has much to commend it at a price that small businesses will find very attractive.