Publishing SIG
E-COMMERCE SURVEY
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Publishing SIG E-COMMERCE SURVEY |
Following are the results of an informal e-mail survey conducted by Deb Weitzel in March 2000 regarding the current status of e-commerce activities in a variety of states.
Alaska: We just set up a secure order form in our online publications catalog. For more information on that, contact our web manager, Carol Kaynor, at fnck@uaf.edu. You might also want to talk to our sales manager, Sherri Pristash, for info on how well it works. Our instructions for ordering online are located at: http://www.uaf.edu/seagrant/Pubs_Videos/Pubs.html#order. We do not have any shopping cart software. People just go to the online ordering form and place their encrypted order. We are getting a slowly increasing number of online publications orders. Most of our orders are from agency folks and researchers. Of our other major audiences, educators also order online with regularity (mostly the free stuff) and we get just a few orders from seafood harvesters, processors, and aquaculturists. We have a distribution center of two people. We are not connected to a cashregister system. We don't even have a cash register! We have an electronic invoicing system (custom, not a bought program) and we key in the information for each order. We don't yet have a shoppingcart program. The university is looking into it but has not yet settled on a program for our system. What we have instead is a very simple CGI script that uses a secure server. The customer fills out a form and submits it. It's then encrypted and sent as an email to our "distribution center" (Sherri). You can see the form at: http://www.uaf.edu/seagrant/forms/pubs/puborder.html. We plan to interface it with our publications database, and yes, we hope it will delete from inventory automatically. At least, that's one of our goals.
Arizona: Arizona is in the testing stages of online ordering. We ended up leading the effort on campus. Our Bursar's office is talking about using our model. We hired someone 18 months ago from the outside who's done this kind of thing before (Susan Gallegos.) We have our own server in our office, we have a secure certificate and we run ColdFusion (front end), our database is being run in Access but we're thinking of moving the database into Oracle or SQL Server. The University has a contract with Bank of America to handle university's banking, credit cards etc. Bank of America set up a merchants account through Cyber Cash (online credit card processing company), all those transactions go out to Cyber cash to verify account, do billing, and back to Bank of America University Account. Sales are automatically taken out of inventory through Access, the distribution center gets a email from ColdFusion (shopping cart program) which leaves off the last four numbers of credit card and orders are in their email box. We are not ready to go public yet, we're reviewing pricing, discounts, shipping and handling, returns policy and we're trying to give our ordering a fresh look so we can stay stable for awhile. As soon as we do this, 4H wants to get on board. We include tax in our sales price and make it broad enough to cover all tax breakdowns. -- Robert Casler
Auburn: We don't but we have been considering it. I understand it is a major headache, though, and we're very understaffed in that area as it is.-- Carol W.
California: We receive the orders, credit card numbers, etc. on line. Then we print them out and process the orders (and verify credit cards) as a separate operation, inputting them into our internal order processing computer alongside phone, mail, and fax orders. We use a package called iHTML, and yes it does use a shopping cart. You can take a look at it here: http://anrcatalog.ucdavis.edu/. -- Jim Coats
Clemson: Here at Clemson (SC), we are taking credit cards through our online ordering system.
Colorado: Our web site and on-line ordering will be going through a major overhaul within the next six months. We will have a secure server and are looking into Cold Fusion. We should be operational by the end of 2000.
Cornell: While we accept Visa and MasterCard online we still have to make the transaction manually i.e. they send us their credit card number and expiration date thru an email order. Then someone at our Resource Center has to manually enter that credit card number into the keypad of our electronic swipe. The site is not secure, nor is it encrypted, but as she said we're not aware of any problems. Encryption costs less (than "secure"), but both cost in the thousands of dollars.
Idaho: Not yet. We take credit cards over the phone, and process them through the computer, but not through the website yet. We'll start doing so when we find a costefficient way of doing so. -- Ivar Nelson
Iowa: Iowa's not doing it yet.. but would like to... please share your experiences.
Missouri: Our publications site is http://muextension.missouri.edu/xplor. Most orders are linked to abstracts. A good example of this would be at http://muextension.missouri.edu/xplor/manuals/m00166.htm. This is a simple ordering system. i.e. not tied directly into an inventory database. For the small number of orders we get over the web it has worked quite well.- George Laur, Publications Coordinator, Extension and Agricultural Information, 198 Ag. Bldg., University of Missouri, Columbia, Columbia, MO 65211
We have been taking credit card orders here at Missouri for a few years. If you want the scoop on how well it is working, you may want to get in touch with Andy Shirkey, Manager of Publications Distribution, (shirkeya@missouri.edu), or George Laur, Publications Coordinator (laurg@missouri.edu). -- Joe Vale, Publications Editor
Philippines: Here at IRRI in the Philippines, we sell our publications via credit card, but use an offsite collaborator in Germany (TRIOPS) to do all the paperwork since they are already set up to do it. This is because IRRI administration does not want to get involved in such things. The concept may or may not work out with various state Extension offices although it might be feasible to find someone already doing it and piggyback on with them for a fee of cost! In our case, TRIOPS is already our European book vendor and we treat a credit card sale through the TRIOPS site as though it were a sale originated through their catalog and so they get the same commission. It works quite well even though a bit cumbersome for the client who has to deal with two sites. As we improve our own online catalog, we will be working to eventually have all the information for a sale inputted on our side and them simply transmitted to Germany. See the explanation we have online at http://www.cgiar.org/irri/TRIOPS2.html -- Gene Hettel, Editor and Head, hettel@cgiar.org, www.cgiar.org/irri
South Carolina: South Carolina accepts MasterCard and Visa for online purchase of publications. The card number is included in an online order and our staff must enter the number to get authorization from the card issuer. We do not yet have automatic authorization. It is a shopping cart kind of deal that was developed by programmers here. If you would like to take a look you can go to http://cufan.clemson.edu/olos/ and log on as a guest. -- Ron Addis, PSA Publishing
Texas: We're aiming to have an ecommerce site online within the year also. That will be the final stage of a large project that begins with restructuring an integrated database for all publication production and distribution/sales information, creating data entry screens and reporting functions for different areas, creating the Web interfaces that customers will see and use, and finally ecommerce. Since we aren't able to do all this ourselves, we sent out RFPs and just received bids from various vendors. We hope to award the bid and get to work real soon. It looks like we'll be using a vendor who has developed proprietary software to do just what we need. If so, and everything works out well, I'll pass along information about the specific programs we get and whatever else you need to know.
Washington: Washington State will use our publications web site as a pilot for the university if they can ever figure out how to make the system work. We've been waiting on them for over a year. Still depending on people to print out the order form and fax it with their card information, or use our 800 number. -- Susan Roberts
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