Fair Trade Webstores
by Roedy Green ©1996-2008 Canadian Mind Products
This essay is about a suggested
student project in
Java programming. This essay gives a rough overview of how it might work. It
does not describe an actual complete program. 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 any way you please.
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.
- On-line 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 10 cents 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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