Buying a UPS for each workstation or a power conditioning and protection system for the whole office is a smooth move.
E-commerce Resources (Web Developer's Journal). How to build online shopping sites. Tutorials on internet security, credit card merchant accounts, shopping cart software, and other electronic commerce help for home or small business.
eCommerce, Ecommerce, Electrionic Commerce, Web Commerce, whatever you want to call it, for us it's selling things over the Internet. You want to take orders on your Web site, your customers will pay for things with credit cards. It might be retail and it might be business-to-business.
We've assembled some articles and opinion pieces
that should help you find your way though the electonic commerce maze to get the
piece of cheese we hear is at the end.
Building
a Simple Ecommerce Web Site
You don't need to spend $millions to build an ecommerce
Web site. There are viable do-it-yourself alternatives at hand. These are cost
effective and require little technical expertise.
Tune
Your Ecommerce Site for the Rush
Christmas Rush, Easter Rush, Summer Rush or a bit
of brisk business next Friday. It doesn't matter when, the principles are the
same. Your servers and bandwidth have to be big enough. Your systems have to be
solid.
Is
SSL dead?
Most security experts have been aware of problems
with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), but they haven't been exploited extensively.
Chances are they will be, though.
Adding
A Dealer Locator To Your Site
Many large corporate Web sites have a "dealer locator"
feature that lets a user enter a zip code and get a list of the closest locations
to them. It turns out to be both cheap and easy to do.
Hey
wait! You didn't pay for that!
There's a dirty little secret about shopping carts: <whisper> most shopping
carts are abandoned full of merchandise before they ever get to the checkout counter!</whisper>
Find out how to reduce your abandonment rate.
Ecommerce
Tutorial
A detailed, three-part tutorial about how to set
up a simple ecommerce Web site.
Ecommerce
on a Budget
A simple, dependable, and inexpensive ecommerce solution
for small businesses is proposed.
E-commerce
in the UK
Multimillion pound savings are emerging from use
of the Web in the UK. Investment bank Schroders are looking to cut over one million
pounds from their annual buying costs. However, it's not all a smooth ride, as
Freeserve will confirm.
Do
the banks hold back E-commerce in the UK?
In the UK, doing business on the Internet is in
some ways still a frontier-town activity. The worst of the outlaws in this game
of Cowboys and Indians are the UK banks and credit card companies.
Shopping
Cart Programs Compared
Need a shopping cart? Here's an overview of your
options, from homegrown JavaScript to easy-to-implement turnkey solutions for
merchants.
NetObjects
Authoring Server Suite 3.0
NetObjects is shooting to alleviate the bottleneck
created when Webmasters are forced to do all the work of developing and deploying
Web content to Internet and Intranet sites.
EDI
as the Backbone of Electronic Commerce
Large and medium-sized companies have been doing business with each other electronically
for years via Electronic Data Interchange (EDI).
Toolkits
for a Distributed, Agent-Based Web Commerce System
This is an 8-part series. As information on the Internet
becomes more dynamic and heterogeneous, 'software agents' have been touted as
the new building blocks for a new Internet structure.
Ecommerce Environment
Why The Web Still Isn't Ready For Consumers
Despite early projections, consumers have not been overwhelming e-retailers with business. The questions we need to ask ourselves are why, and is there anything positive we can do to improve the situation?
Reducing
Online Credit Card Fraud
Credit card company figures show that 90 per cent
of consumers are reimbursed when their cards are used fraudulently, while 75 per
cent of online retailers have to eat the cost when they're the victims of credit
card fraud.
Gambling
Online And Offshore
Online betting and gaming revenues are predicted
to reach $10 billion by 2002. Interactive betting services are looking to attract
a new audience - the middle classes and women.
Dotcom
Bubble - "The Emperor Has No Clothes!"
Expect valuations in ecommerce companies and other
consumer business to go down even further. Somebody has noticed the Emperor is
nude and the stock market and venture capitalists are no longer prepared to pay
for his wardrobe.
You
Paid How Much For That Domain Name?
The domain name Business.com was recently sold for
a staggering $8 million. If you've got a domain name to sell, or you'd like to
buy one, where on the Internet should you start looking, and how much will it
be worth?
Archive
Electronic
CommerceBy Frank Griffel, Tuan Tu, Winfreid
Lamersdorf (editors)
Book review.
Web Commerce
Cookbookby Gordon McComb
Book review. Explains how to set up sites to sell
either tangible goods, or content. Includes a wealth of useful CGI scripts and
HTML templates.
Internet Commerceby Andrew Dahl and Leslie Lesnick
This is also a pretty comprehensive guide.
Frontiers
of Electronic Commerceby Ravi
Kalakota and Andrew B. Whinston
This textbook covers credit card systems, EDI, electronic
cash systems, security, and much more.
Electronic
Commerce - A Manager's Guide by
Ravi Kalakota and Andrew B. Whinston
When I was a kid I used to delight in flushing the toilet when my brother was in the shower in the other bathroom. This always resulted in a loud, bellowing "yoweeee!" as the toilet's pull on the cold water created a hot water surge in the shower, parboiling my brother. UPS systems avoid parboiling your computer system.
January 1997
Everybody's familiar with power surges and brownouts when the lights suddenly dim a bit and then burn brighter again. Your hard drive, power supply, as well as other components are being scalded when this happens. Even worse, your data might get scalded. If you've ever experienced corrupted files, power surges may have been the culprit.
Why the power company can't supply steady, even power is beyond me to comprehend. Although I know a bit about electronics I don't know anything about power generation and distribution. I'm like most people - I expect the light to go on when I flip the switch and that's all I want to know about it. Surges however, are a real problem that effect anyone with a computer or other expensive, sensitive piece of electronic equipment. Lightning obviously can fry computers and other household equipment. I've experienced several computers wiped out by lightning. Small power surges are a more insidious menace. They can corrupt data and ruin components but they can also slowly cause cumulative wear and tear as your hard drive slows down and speeds up due to uneven power supply.
When we first received some UPS systems to review we installed them on several of our computers here in the office and I took one home to use with my home machine. After plugging it in everything worked as usual and I couldn't even tell it was hooked up until I cranked up my laser printer at which point everything went kerblooey. If I had read the manual I would have realized that laser printers draw a bit too much juice for the small, personal UPS system I was using. I was a bit fuddled, though, as I computed through the evening and I heard an occasional small whir out of my new UPS. I finally figured out that the UPS whirred whenever my wife turned on the garbage disposal or started the dryer or when the dishwasher kicked into a new cycle. All these years I've been scalding my computer (or rather, my wife has) and I didn't even know it! Small surges like those can have a cumulative effect - especially on mechanical parts like hard drive motors and bearings. Strangely, my wife was not sympathetic when I told her she had been sabotaging my computer and quickly put the kibosh on the idea that maybe she should reimburse me for the hard drive I had to replace last year.
So I found out I have been having power surges and didn't even know it. I learned early on to throw out the cheesy power strips I bought at K-Mart and replace them with proper surge protectors. The K-Mart jobs cost about $6 and the good quality surge suppressers cost about $60. But if we're protecting several thousand dollars worth of equipment and irreplaceable data that's not too big of a difference and is certainly not too much to pay for security. Following the same line of argument $100 for a personal UPS system is also not too much to pay. Now, I'd never compute at home without one.
Everybody's familiar with power surges and brownouts when the lights suddenly dim a bit and then burn brighter again. Your hard drive, power supply, as well as other components are being scalded when this happens. Even worse, your data might get scalded. If you've ever experienced corrupted files, power surges may have been the culprit.
