Transaction processing, lots to consider

For shop sites, how the transaction will be processed

There is lots of information out there about setting up a shopping cart/store on your site, so I won’t cover those items. I’d like to go over all the _other_ options, and how to get the money from your people!

Some sites, (eg. Amazon.com) have wonderful API’s which allow you as the web developer SO much opportunity to sell stuff. If the things you want to sell are already on Amazon, more’s the better, because not only can you earn money by selling these products, but you can ALSO earn a cut of selling them through Amazon! Neat huh?

There are other store’s which offer similar API’s, as well as some which have affiliate programs worth pursuing. If you don’t have many things to sell, and you’re in the right market segment, then another example is Best Buy. They offer you the ability to earn a small percentage on what people end up buying at their online store, after clicking on a link from you. The only real drawback with them is that there is no API. That means all data about the product, including the link to it, you have to manually find in their tools, and add to your site.

The beauty of using an API, is that you can have your site do all the work for you!

I’m a massive fan of letting the site do all the work.. that’s what they are for right? An API should let you find out a lot of information about the product you wish to sell, after being given only a little. You can send over the UPC, title, or similar identifier, and have the other site tell you everything about it. From the cost, the link for more information, a buy link, an image of it, reviews, and much more. Using just this information you can enrich the content on your own site, without having to do much at all! Plus it can happen real time, so the information the user is seeing the most current possible.

As much as possible writing small add on’s, applications, or server side scripts to take care of any manual task the better. When a user see’s your content changing, they will come back more often, just to see what’s different! Creating a “clearance” or “news” section to a site, then never updating it, is instant site death. If a user comes to your site twice, and doesn’t see this information change, they won’t come back again because they assume it will never change. You don’t have to make it too hard on yourself, especially if you can make that content truly dynamic. If you spend a day a month just creating news items for the next month, then use a content manager to schedule them to come out every few days, suddenly your site appears relevant and up to date, even if that is the only thing on the site which is changing!