Fair Trade Webstores
by Roedy Green ©1996-2009 Canadian Mind Products
This essay does not describe an existing computer program, just
one that should exist. This essay is about a suggested
student
project in Java programming. This essay gives a rough overview of how it
might work. I have
no source, object, specifications, file layouts or
anything else useful to implementing this project. Everything I have to say to
help you with this project is written below. I am
not prepared to help
you implement it; I have too many other projects of my own.
I do contract work for a living, which could include writing a program such as
this. However, I don’t do people’s homework
for them. That just robs them of an education.
You have my full permission to implement this project in any way you please and
to keep all the profits from your endeavor.
Introduction
This project is designed to sell fair trade products such as coffee, chocolate,
cocoa and tea on the Internet, and in home businesses and in small storefronts.
You can think of it as a specialised affiliate program or a
specialiased shopping cart program.
How It Works
There are four classes of participants:
- People who maintain little websites selling fair trade products. They don’t need to know anything about HTML
or FTP to do this. The webstore part of their site is automatically
generated and maintained for them. They don’t even necessarily have to have a website of their own…
- Suppliers. People who roast the coffee or package it in imaginative ways and ship it.
- People with home businesses who hold Tupperware parties to sell fair trade products to their friends. They place orders
over the Internet at various webstores.
- People with small storefront businesses. They place orders over the Internet at various webstores.
Some people may participate in more than one way, perhaps all four.
The Shopping Cart
To build a website, you simply select the products you want to sell, ticking them off a list. You can add you own
commentary and images, and some limited ability to select the colourscheme and theme of the automatically generated
website. You decide how much markup you want on each product you offer.
The webstore is completely vanilla. It would not need Servlet, JSP or PHP hosting. The shopping cart would be handled by
a central server, and distributed use of Java Applets, Java Web Start and perhaps a touch of JavaScript.
When customer use a unified electronic shopping cart, creating an order that may be satisfied by many different
suppliers.
The customer pays by credit card or PayPal.
The money is split three ways:
- Mostly to the suppliers.
- A variable commission to the owner of the webstore. The webstore owner sets whatever markup he wants, just like a
regular storefront. If he sets it too high, people won’t buy products from his webstore. The commission can also
vary depending on quantity.
- A variable commission to the supplier of the computer services that makes this all happen and who collects and
distributes the money. The commission would not include hosting a website, just the automatic creation of it. Hosting
would be a separate flat fee.
Somebody may be both a supplier and have a website. He then pays himself a commission for sales of his own products, and
also the commission to the computer service provider.
The Pieces of Software
What software needs to be written?
- You need a database of the participants, the products offered, their descriptions, pictures of them, what each products
each participant wants to sell, fair trade certifacation. etc.
- Online shopping cart program.
- Program to let website owner select what will be for sale on his webstore, and his markups. The let the website owner
select products he want to specially feature.
- Program to let a supplier describe his products and prices. Any changes are reflected within a day at all webstores.
Discontinued products disappear, prices and shipping are automatically recomputed.
- You need a way of securely accepting credit card information over the Internet. I have already written this. It does not
even need SSL.
- You need a way of sending credit card information over the Internet to the credit card companies.
- You need a way to generate a complete website from the list of product descriptions and additional commentary.
- You need a way to show prices in the native currency of the buyer, e.g. CurrCon,
and automatically compute shipping charges.
- You need a way to upload that website to client’s ISP host and to efficiently keep that website up to date,
similar to the way the Replicator works.
- You need a way to send the orders to whomever is responsible, and track their status. Customers need to be able to track
the status of their orders and contact the various companies involved by email or phone.
- You need to send out the cheques to everyone, usually by direct deposit into bank accounts. I have already written this
code in Abundance.
This is a project that is nicely suited to be written by a team, each member taking on one piece of the overall task.
Phases
The ideas could be developed in phases. Each phase could be a useful product in itself.
- Simple Applet that collects information about a single purchase, sends it encrypted to a
server, which then relays it still encrypted to the vendor by Java Web Start or email. The vendor then processes the
order as if it were a mail or phone order credit card. The server is not involved in handling the money. It just relays
messages. Unsigned Applets may not talk to the central server, but signed ones can. The
scheme would have to be implemented with a combination of unsigned Applets to display prices
in the reader’s home currency as per CurrCon, signed Applets
to make purchases when the user clicks a buy button, and Java Web Start to communicate with vendors. The server does not
keep any information about customers on file. The vendor describes a product to the server, and the server show the
vendor the HTML to embed to sell that product. The server keeps no records of the server’s products. This scheme
could be sold on a gas tank basis for perhaps $0.10 a transaction.
- Shopping cart that lets the customer select several items before making the purchase. All items must be purchased from
the website owner. The server is not involved in handling the money. It just relays encrypted messages to the vendor.
The server keeps a database of the vendor’s products giving price, base currency and description.
- Shopping cart that automatically computes shipping and handling based on the location of the customer and the combined
weights of the items. All items must be purchased from the website owner. The server is not involved in handling the
money. It just relays messages. The server keeps a database of the vendor’s products giving price, base currency,
description, handling fee and weight. The server also keeps a database of shipping rules based on weight and location.
- Fair Trade scheme where you can offer products from many vendors for sale on your website. There is a common electronic
link to the credit card companies, and monthly cheques to all vendors.
Making It Real
It won’t work unless you can get suppliers to sign up. You will likely have to do all the work for them, starting
with their published price lists, perhaps not even officially having their permission. They just start getting orders.
You also have to get people to create websites. You use existing websites to automatically explain the plan and sign up
more websites. Signing up is free. The user might even create the website with a random sampling of products, or ones
chosen from nearby suppliers so it takes almost no work to set up.
Getting the right to accept credit cards over the Internet requires some major juice. You have to put up a large bond or
have the backing of a big company. To start, you would probably have to use PayPal to avoid this problem.
Using a phased approach lets you build on experience, and start with very low operating cost, low liability, low
technology, and low capital.
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