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Volume II - Issue VII - October 2002
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Updates To The Catalog and Shopping Cart
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Joseph West
Vice President, EZ-NetTools
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Introduction
Over the last 15 months we have been working on upgrading the entire e-commerce set of tools. The scope of the project includes the payment process, the checkout and shipping process, the shopping cart, and the catalog. Our plan was to implement these changes in phases. Last winter and spring we upgraded the payment and checkout processes. We are getting ready to make changes in the shopping cart and the catalog. This last phase will be further broken into additional steps.
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Changes Planned for November 2002
The first step, due in November, will be a major upgrade. However, you will not notice many, if any changes. Let me give you an analogy to help you understand why. It will be like we are building a basement under an existing house. We will lift up the house, dig the hole for the basement, build a new foundation, and then lower the house onto the new foundation. The "house" will look exactly the same. Once this preliminary work is complete the house can be modified, adding new rooms and additional stories to the house.
In the EZ-NetTools situation, we will move all the catalog and shopping cart data to an entirely new and more robust database system. However, to minimize the impact to you, we have not changed the screen layouts that you are accustomed to using. By doing this we will minimize the impact on you and allow us to focus our attention on a narrow set of potential problems during the conversion. We do anticipate that the catalog and shopping carts tools will process more rapidly and more reliably as a result of this first step.
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Sampling of Enhancements to Come After The First of the Year
Following the conversion to the new database, we will try to limit any updates to these tools until after the holiday season. We want to make sure everything is very stable and reliable during this busy season. However, during this time we will begin to develop major enhancements to the catalog. Some examples will be:
- We will be allow a product to belong to multiple categories. For example, a product could belong to its normal category as well as a SALE category.
- Categories will be able to be nested. For example you could have a category for women's coats within women's clothing within clothing in general.
- Products will be able to have more than attributes (size, color, style, etc) and the attributes can be different for each product. Unlike now where you can have up to two optional fields that apply to all products.
After that we will develop ways to allow more customization of how the catalog pages and the checkout will look.
So, there are some exciting changes will start showing up after the first of the year.
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Important Information Pertaining to the November Upgrade
The conversion to the new database requires that your catalog data be more carefully designed. IF YOUR CATALOG HAS ANY OF THE FOLLOWING CONDITIONS, IT MAY NOT FUNCTION AFTER THE CONVERSION IN NOVEMBER. Therefore, please read these issues carefully and make any necessary changes prior to November.
- Every product must have a product number and that product number must be unique among your product numbers. This only makes good sense anyway. If you had any products without numbers you could have some confusion. Second, having duplicate product numbers could lead to additional confusion. During the conversion if we find products without product numbers or duplicate product numbers we will create a unique product number of the item.
- If your product is assigned to a category, then that category must exist as well. If not the product may be deleted.
- If you do not use our shopping cart but have some other process to sends data to the check out process, you must use the special Application Program Interface (API) to do this. If you now send that data to a cgi script called "first" it will not work after the conversion in November. For more information about how to use the API, call Technical Support.
- We have not decided for sure, but we may not convert any catalog data from a deactivated account. So if you have any accounts that have been deactivated for any reason but plan to activate them in the future, you should consider down loading this data and then uploading it after the conversion. We will send you more information on this potential issue.
- We will do a general cleaning of the data. For example, if you have alphabetical characters (a, b c, #, etc) in a numerical field such as a price or shipping weight, we will convert these field to zeros.
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Our plan is to perform this conversion the first part of November. Therefore, please make these changes prior to the end of October.
Summary
We are excited to see how much the catalog and ordering tools are being used. Usage is up nearly 25 percent over last year. We are excited to provide additional tools to make your e-commerce sites even more effective.
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