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General discussion

Need one more e-commerce solution

Jul 26, 2004 6:27PM PDT

I've come to the conclusion, that because of the bandwidth options available to me, I'd be better off getting my e-commerce site hosted by a hosting provider. I found a cool deal with 80Gb storage and 1000 Gb/Mo download, with root access, backups, the whole schmeer!

I have the code for the site on my local server and I'm ready to upload as soon as my ISP delivers my broadband.

My problem is how to get the document flow from the website into my accounting software. Maybe there is a solution that doesn't require re-inventing the wheel.

My website was done in JSP with Apache2 and the Tomcat4 servlet container. Postgres SQL is my database on the back end. I plan to link to a Verign shopping cart ap for customer checkout.

The first problem is notification. When I had originally planned to host my own server, I had visions of Cron daemons sending me e-mail notification when new sales orders arrived. This method could more than likely still be used, but why not save time and CODE if you can.

The other problem is getting sales orders, generating purchase orders, posting sales and RMAs to the ledger in an automated fashion. I was thinking of using Quickbooks Online for the accounting system.

Once again I could accomplish this myself with a host of daemons, report generators and browser based JSP aps. However the work and time envolved makes this effort seem a bit foolhardy. Not to mention the fact that running an accounting related ap on or against a remote database on a webserver raises some security concerns.

Can anyone recommend a better solution?

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