Remote Cart Experiment

[John Jupp]

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Many thanks PrezzyBox.

Zak has very kindly agreed to an experiment whereby we shall set up a test site to integrate a remote cart with PrezzyBox.

If all tracks smoothly, network id can then be integrated and we can then supply to any interested parties details on remote cart operation for integration into merchant payment systems enabling affiliates to have fully functioning shopping carts with the end use transferring to the merchant.

This should deal with Google's attempts at removing PPC affiliates from the paid search fields.

Many thanks to Donk, my ever handy techie, for agreeing to oversee this experiment.

[7heaven]

Afternoon,

We are very interested in this, we have a site ready to go, and it is just looking for this. Please keep me updated on what happens.

If you can, please PM me an expected date we can try it out?

Look forward to hearing
Ant

[lowndsy]

I posted asking about this last week but noone even read the post ! I'd be interested if it works, but I'd like to be able to share 1 cart across several domains as well.

Cheers,
Steve

[yesasia]

Hi John,

How does a remote cart work ? Do you still send the customer to the merchant site. and if so at which stage ? or do you send the order information to the merchant, without the customer visitng the merchant site ?

thanks
Stefan

[Donk]

Hi Stefan

The way I can see it working is this.

The affiliate picks up the merchants data feed with stock levels on a daily basis and put them into the ZEN shopping cart system which can be modified with the afiliates colours/ logos etc.

The merchant also produces an "out of stock" feed which the affiliate can pick up on a more regular basis possibly once every hour.

The Customer arrives at the site and does his shopping, filling the basket in the normal way until the "proceed to checkout" button. At this point the customer is sent to an exit page (which can be hidden from bots with robots.txt). This page adds the tracking information and sends all the information via the network to a landing page on the merchants website either using the "POST" or "GET" method whichever is more suited to the merchant.

The merchant wiil then have to pick up this information and inject it directly into his own payment sytem.

The whole process from the proceed to checkout to arriving at the merchants payment system will not be noticed by the customer.

It sounds fairly simple in theory but as all networks / merchants will supply/require different information it could turn out to be a nightmare.

This will mean that the each affiliate site will be restrictricted to one merchant so it will not be sutable for comparison sites. However in the light of what is happening to affiliates on the search engines I suspect it may work.

Any suggestion, hints or drawbacks would be appreciated at this stage before I get too deeply into the project.

One major one I am aware of is the customer details and the implications of the data protection act. The way I see that working is to remove the customer login for affiliates that are not covered by the DPA and allow for optional Name and Address fields to be sent to the merchant for those that are covered in that way the customer will not have to fill in their details twice.

Bob

[John Jupp]

Donk

I'm incommunicado for a few days as I'm busy working on templates. If you need me just email me as I pick those up regularly.

Any affiliates/merchants interested in progressing this please feel free to get in touch. Providing we can get the bare bones working and then install network tracking we'll be sharing our findings with interested parties.

[monkeyboy]

Hi, I'm Tony the Prezzybox techie and I've just emailed Donk about this so I thought I'd post here to let you know what we at Prezzybox were thinking. This is the early stages and we are very much open to suggestion so nothing below is set in stone.

To answer your questions Stefan, the way we see this working is that your site instructs Prezzybox to store an item in a basket, at the moment we're looking at using SOAP to do this.

You can modify the basket contents: add, remove, change quantities and get a list of basket contents without the customer leaving your site.

When it comes to checkout there are several options. You can capture the sender and delivery details on your site and pass them to us via SOAP. Or you can pass the customer to us anonymously and we'll capture their details.

We then go through the usual payment steps. Again there are options on how this can accomplished.

For those who aren't familiar with SOAP it's a way of passing data between servers in the background and it's widely supported in server side technologies such as php, perl, asp.net, etc.

From the outside world, including Google, the shopping basket will appear to exist on the site that displays the pages. All communication between the affiliate site and Prezzybox is unseen to site browser.

As far as tracking by the networks is concerned there are again a number of options and we will ensure that any solution includes full tracking.

[Donk]

Just a quick update on this project.

A simple product feed with shopping cart has been implemented and I have been in contact with Tony at Prezzybox with regards to send him the output data.

I've got a little stuck on the category mapping. I've been using Affiliate Future and Affiliate Windows feeds. Each have got their own category mapping sytem in place but, of course, they are incompatible with each other. Has anyone got a 'translation table' available before I spend weeks creating one?

Bob

[John Jupp]

Just to update on Donk's post.

We can now list every merchant on a shopping portal with individual shopping carts but we shall not be combining merchants on the same page.

The products are all listed and can be added to basket and when a customer has finished shopping they then go to the merchants payment system.

We have got this working for PrezzyBox, Woolworths, JustHom and we're working on others right now.

The category mapping is however the one area still to address. This is to ensure the left of the page has individual product categories with the correct number of products listed.

Anyone who can assist Bob (Donk) with category mapping please get in touch.

When we have finished this we shall then be contacting the networks to see if they wish to make this a standard offering for all affiliates as the affiliate tracking code is there but only functions at payment (which search engines may not follow). The remaining code is stripped and not registered by the search engines.

We shall also offer this to individual merchants for indie schemes.

At present I am paying Donk to produce this. I shall be discussing with Donk how to extend this to anyone that wants this but I have yet to decide whether to make this a FREE utility or perhaps something reciprocal.

[John Jupp]

AND


The system now works across multiple domains providing they are on the same server. So we have integrated this into our automatic product feed update and direct ftp from the networks!!!!!!!!

[essdeekay]

Crikey, you'll have discovered the meaning of life by the weekend at this rate!

Please keep us/me informed - very interested in this.

Kind regards

Simon

[yesasia]

So you also need to do the shipping calculation on the affiliate site ? Or does it happen on the merchant site ? It sounds like a good idea anyway.

Stefan

[Donk]

Simon

I'll have the meaning of life sorted by lunchtime -- the cart may take a bit longer!

Stefan

The posting and packaging hasn't been included at this stage as it is to much of a variable. Some merchants charge by item some by weight others have free packaging over a certain order value etc. Also these costs are not always available from the standard network product feed. I have simply included a disclaimer "Postage and packaging will be added at the checkout" by the checkout button.

The software is written in modules so it could be modified to be specific to a particular network or even merchant.

The site designed for the affiliates is near completion but I'm trying to solve two issues.

1/ Category mapping as previously stated.
2/ The text editor for the page contents. I am currently using FCKeditor which is free for personal use but if it were bundled it with the cart I'd have to get a commercial licence at $750. A work around would be to supply the software without an editor and just give a link to various editors that could be easily added.

Bob

[pricethat]

paaahh, part time slackers..... Meanwhile i have been researching and have studied some of the universes greatest literature including the biblious work of art called hitch hikers guide to the galaxy to deliver to you "the meaning of life, the universe and EVERYTHING"

And here it is my friends....

42


As for the remote cart, just whack up a normal store and collect the sale like normal and just do remote secure rss for all new orders.. simple innit? That way all people can make allsorts of stores in any style they want, any system they want to use all they need to do is make an rss/xml type service for merchants to connect to, or am i missing something vitally important other than merchants providing a better realtime xml feed?

[ceetee]

2/ The text editor for the page contents. I am currently using FCKeditor which is free for personal use but if it were bundled it with the cart I'd have to get a commercial licence at $750. A work around would be to supply the software without an editor and just give a link to various editors that could be easily added.

Bob

Have you tried the other common 2nd generation javascript editor http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/? It's dead easy to use and I'm sure it doesn't require a commercial license. They make money from plugins instead.