[UPHPU] eCommerce - what do you use?

[Jonathan Duncan]

On 28 Jan 2008, at 10:35, cole at colejoplin.com wrote:

> While I don't believe this is a solution for most developers in this  
> group, I'll mention this only because you've stated this is a media  
> company. It strikes me that you may want to consider doing an RIA,  
> like Flex (SDK is open source), and using PHP as a service. In fact,  
> I'll be doing one myself this spring.
>
> Why did I choose RIA? First, the user experience is a generation  
> ahead. I read an article about eComm sites, their carts and  
> conversion rates The general conclusion was that RIA carts had a 50%  
> higher conversion rate than non-RIAs. To make their IT happy, Armani  
> Exchange's eCommerce site converted their Flash-based cart to a new  
> JSP page driven cart, and immediately suffered a 40% drop in sales.  
> Hmmmmm. If we hit a recession, that alone could make the difference  
> between living and dying.
>
> Second, things like error recovery and transaction retries with  
> traditional carts are a nightmare. This is by the far the biggest  
> client complaint I always get on carts. RIAs give you state and  
> security (but not so much with AJAX RIAs). RIAs have no pages to  
> refresh, no sessions to read and handle, no funky server-side cart  
> installations. Just immediate, secure, two-way communications, where  
> the server is not nearly as stressed. And if you don't want to code  
> an RIA cart yourself, and don't need open source, you can buy one  
> (like http://www.allurent.com/).
>
> If your contract was won on the back of an open source php-based  
> cart, then never mind. But speaking for myself, I think I've done my  
> last non-RIA cart.
>

I am getting into Flex.  Very cool stuff.  uses PHP via AMF for server  
side processing.  Amazingly quick development.  RIA is the wave of the  
future, in my ever so humble opinion.