E-commerce & Integration
E-commerce & Integration
One of the most logical uses of the Internet is for buying and selling goods. In two cases I have had the opportunity to build full-range e-shop solutions from scratch for my customers.
Moccabox
The first was for the online coffee-shop Moccabox. The e-shop was part of a dedicated Content Management System, that I developed for the site.
Screenshot of the Moccabox shopping-basket
All scripting is done using Javascript ASP, with all products, orders and customerdata being stored in an Access database. Customers can pay using danish payment-cards and payment-transactions are executed via external payment-gateways to the banking system.
Integration with accounting backend
When first launched, all order transactions and payment capture was administered from the database system developed by me (using a web frontend). But in February 2005 the system was changed to integrate directly to the customers accounting system.
The accounting system is e-conomic and is a very popular ASP accounting platform for small and medium sized companies in Denmark and in early 2005 it was expanded with a secure API, allowing customers' other systems - eg. e-shop frontends - to query, update and insert customers, orders, etc. This is acheived by exchanging packets of XML over secure Internet-connections. These packets contain commands and results in a structured form.
An order being processed in e-conomic
Being based extensively on XML already, the Moccabox e-shop was easily integrated. For example when extracting and updating product-info, a simple XSLT-stylesheet is used to convert data from between the two vocabularies.
Copenhagen Zoo (www.zoo.dk)
Having developed and implemented the CMS for Copenhagen Zoo in 1999, and updated it with a new look in 2003, I was contacted by their marketing department to extend the site with e-shop functionality, allowing people to buy different types of annual passes to the zoo, and to pay using standard payment over the Internet.
The page for buying annual passes
The e-shop was done using XML as the document-format, and adding presentation-templates to the main XSLT-stylesheet for showing the different products and forms for inputting and validating customer-data. The completed order is then passed on to the Architrade DIBS payment-gateway which handles the secure transactions of recieving card-info and processing the authprization of the given amount in the customers bank. These pages were customized to look completely identical to the corporate look of the zoo site.
Handling each order is done online via a dedicated administration-frontend that is part of the Architrade DIBS system
These systems will later be integrated with Zoo's ERP (Microsoft Business Solutions Navision) after defining the other business processes involved.