Alpha Sports Web? Shopping Cart Example?

[bob9145]

Re: Alpha Sports Web? Shopping Cart Example?

Alright so I was a little bit pessimistic. Would you recommend NVP?
Tks
Bob

[Steve Wood]

Re: Alpha Sports Web? Shopping Cart Example?

I use NVP, or Name Value Pair. It simply means the data you transfer between PayPal looks like this:

fname=Steve&lname=Wood

PP's other option is SOAP, which probably has benefits but is harder to code. SOAP communications looks more like XML.

[Steve Wood]

Re: Alpha Sports Web? Shopping Cart Example?

Drop-In Shopping Cart Update - Wendy and I spent some time configuring the cart for her application. Had issues with character versus numeric keys, and her field names were different than mine. So where it stands is that the cart is fully integrated in Wendy's application and she will test out the cart live and make sure it works on that side. I am making some edits in the code to make the cart "drop in" to an existing application with greater ease. For instance, it will allow you to enter what YOUR table field names are for Primary Key, ItemNumber, ItemDescription, ItemTitle, etc. That way you should not have to edit the code for it to sync up with your application. The important thing about a "drop in" module like this is the Add To Cart button has to work no matter where you put it or what table it draws product information from.

The other complication was that Wendy has four Buy buttons per record, so we added an OPTION=X to each button code to make them unique. Each button then pulls pricing from a related Pricing table.

By the way, having spent some time on Wendy's site -- she puts most of us developers to shame. Very well engineered.

[Peter.Greulich]

Re: Alpha Sports Web? Shopping Cart Example?

By the way, having spent some time on Wendy's site -- she puts most of us developers to shame. Very well engineered.

Wendy is a dynamo!


(but don't let it go to your head)

[WendyWelton]

Re: Alpha Sports Web? Shopping Cart Example?

Thank you guys!

Hey - how come my hat suddenly doesn't fit? When did it get so tight?

[WendyWelton]

Re: Alpha Sports Web? Shopping Cart Example?

We have the shopping cart live in "Sandbox" mode (Paypal's test mode).

I'll do a couple of short videos tomorrow to show how the admin end works. If you want to see how the front end works:

www.Afhp.co
Pick any plan and pretend to buy some stuff.

At checkout, it will take you to Paypal's Sandbox fake payment site. Use the following for the "buyer":

[email protected]
Password: 308922393

The only thing you won't experience exactly as a buyer would, is that you won't get a confirmation email from Paypal, because it's set up to use a fake buyer's email, not your email.

The Sandbox only works if I have my Sandbox account open. I'll try not to close it, and I set it to keep me logged in, but if it's closed and you want to test it out, just post here. I get automatic email notification - I'll see it and wake it up again.

[Steve Wood]

Re: Alpha Sports Web? Shopping Cart Example?

Wendy,

They won't be able to see the PayPal checkout process at all because the "sandbox" has to be running on the visitor's machine, not yours. So you might just turn off sandbox mode tell Forum members to actually buy anthing unless they really want to own it.

FYI - "Sandbox" is PayPal's testing environment. If you have sandbox on, then all transactions are fake.

[WendyWelton]

Re: Alpha Sports Web? Shopping Cart Example?

Bummer! I wanted to show it off! Oh well. I'll do a couple of Jing videos tomorrow.

[WendyWelton]

Re: Alpha Sports Web? Shopping Cart Example?

OK - We have a demo!

The buyer experience:
http://www.screencast.com/t/6UWFzmnXzZ

The setup experience:
http://www.screencast.com/t/gMLiwNKngr

You can also push all the buttons on www.afhp.co - including Pay Now and it won't buy anything. It will just throw an error screen when you get to Paypal (you'd have to be logged in as the buyer first to have it work).

Steve's off on vacation for 10 days, and we've targeted a couple of things to tweak for the final. But it's pretty much done and pretty smooth. I believe the only thing that will require any hand coding will be any changes you want to placement on your pages for the cart itself and the "buy" buttons. I had already set up using the AlphaToGo template, and we added it to it - so I know it can be added after the fact. I'm 99.9% sure it can be added to other applications - that it will not require the web template itself.

There are a couple more fields I know he'll be adding to the setup screen, like the primary key, product number and description fields in your product table, if you don't use the product table that comes with it.

When he gets back he'll answer other technical questions, and questions about price, timing, etc. I'm happy to try and answer anything.

[Larry Gordon]

Re: Alpha Sports Web? Shopping Cart Example?

Fantastic news Wendy! Just what we need. I will be using Barclays Merchant as opposed to Paypal, but I look forward to progressing with Steve after his vacation.
Kind regards,
Larry

[WendyWelton]

Re: Alpha Sports Web? Shopping Cart Example?

And we're out of Sandbox mode - got a call from someone who's probably going to buy....

So - don't anybody go sending us money you didn't intend to send!

[Larry Gordon]

Re: Alpha Sports Web? Shopping Cart Example?

Hi Wendy,
How did the tests go and do you have any more news?
Kind regards,
Larry Gordon

[WendyWelton]

Re: Alpha Sports Web? Shopping Cart Example?

Scott,

The payment part of Steve's cart is only one part of it, the last part. I think even I could manage to replace the "Pay Now" button with a "Submit Now" button that instead of going to Paypal sends an email.

The other parts of the cart are, imho, equally important, and are things that I either never would have managed on my own, or if I were more experienced, would have taken significant time. There are a lot of parts and pieces to getting from that Buy Button to an intelligently managed cart that doesn't clog your application up with a new record every time somebody thinks maybe, but doesn't buy, to the user easily making changes in their cart, to the various messages and text pieces that guide them on their way and provide the feedback the customer needs. I'm quite thrilled with it all. It's a clean, clear, complete and professional experience for my buyers, making me look clean, clear, complete and professional!

[aburningflame]

Re: Alpha Sports Web? Shopping Cart Example?

Scott,

The payment part of Steve's cart is only one part of it, the last part. I think even I could manage to replace the "Pay Now" button with a "Submit Now" button that instead of going to Paypal sends an email.

The other parts of the cart are, imho, equally important, and are things that I either never would have managed on my own, or if I were more experienced, would have taken significant time. There are a lot of parts and pieces to getting from that Buy Button to an intelligently managed cart that doesn't clog your application up with a new record every time somebody thinks maybe, but doesn't buy, to the user easily making changes in their cart, to the various messages and text pieces that guide them on their way and provide the feedback the customer needs. I'm quite thrilled with it all. It's a clean, clear, complete and professional experience for my buyers, making me look clean, clear, complete and professional!

Wendy, you're replying to posts that I made before Steves cart - posts that were made a very long time ago.
Someone asked about a cart - and I provided feedback on a portion of it.
"I think even I could manage to replace the "Pay Now" button with a "Submit Now" button that instead of going to Paypal sends an email." - Ok...sure - Im not sure what you were referring to here - I was simply offering information about how a cart in the db/session would interact with payment gateway.

"There are a lot of parts and pieces to getting from that Buy Button to an intelligently managed cart that doesn't clog your application up with a new record every time somebody thinks maybe, but doesn't buy, to the user easily making changes in their cart, to the various messages and text pieces that guide them on their way and provide the feedback the customer needs. " - Of course - but, just because your application has a new record inserted - doesn't mean that the cart is clogging up your application. When I go to amazon.com and I place stuff in my cart - its still there next time I login (is this 'clogging' the application?). I had never made any comments about the merit of steves work - I was merely providing you with information on how to manage a cart in session and the database.

Steve does good work - and Im glad his cart is working well for you.

[WendyWelton]

Re: Alpha Sports Web? Shopping Cart Example?

Larry

The tests have gone well. It's active and functioning nicely.

I've had only one glitch - one buyer who can't put items in his cart. He's using Windows Server 2003 as his desktop operating system - and I cannot duplicate the failure on my Windows Server 2003 machine. I get no errors at all on IE, Safari, Chrome and Firefox - both from my office and testing it on other people's machines. When I test by accessing from my server, which also runs on Windows Server 2003, I do get an "error on page" but am able to add items to my cart and proceed to payment.

I already know I have an error of some kind in my application - I get errors that it can't find a pointer, stuff like that. So, we're 99.9% sure the problem is in my application, not the cart. And we're even more sure that it's compounded by some weirdness in that guys setup - because even with a page error little yellow triangle, it works from my Windows Server machine. If I wasn't looking for that error sign, I never even would have known there was anything going on. iow - if I was a buyer, I would have bought without incident.

So - even though I know Steve wishes we could eliminate that error entirely, hunt it down via putting the cart on my hosting etc - I'm spending my available time first on hunting down what I know to be a problem - some error in my application, so see if that cures it first. We've incredibly tight on money at the moment. I've started with cleaning up grids one at a time - that had way more fields, calculations and leftover crud in them than I now know I need. That hasn't cured by pointer errors yet. As soon as I'm able I'm going to buy a support ticket from A5 and see if they can find where I screwed up by application.