Fair Trade Webstores

• You are here :
• home
• Java Glossary
• Student Projects
• Fair Trade Webstores
•  

©1996-2012 Roedy Green, Canadian Mind Products

Please do not email me about this project without reading the disclaimer above.

Introduction

You can think of it as a specialised affiliate program or a specialiased shopping cart program.

How It Works

1. 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…
2. Suppliers. People who roast the coffee or package it in imaginative ways and ship it.
3. 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.
4. People with small storefront businesses. They place orders over the Internet at various webstores.

The Shopping Cart

The webstore is completely vanilla. It would not need Servlet, JSP (Java Server Pages) or PHP (Pre-Hypertext Processor) 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:

1. Mostly to the suppliers.
2. 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.
3. 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.

The Pieces of Software

• 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 (Secure Sockets Layer).
• 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 (Internet Service Provider) 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.

Phases

1. 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 (Hypertext Markup Language) 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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

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.

	You can get the freshest copy of this page from:	or possibly from your local J: drive (Java virtual drive/mindprod.com website mirror)
	http://mindprod.com/project/fairtrade.html	J:\mindprod\project\fairtrade.html
	Please email your feedback for publication, letters to the editor, errors, omissions, typos, formatting errors, ambiguities, unclear wording, broken/redirected link reports, suggestions to improve this page or comments to Roedy Green : . If you want your message, your name or email kept confidential, not considered for public posting, please explicitly specify that. Unless you state otherwise, I will treat your message as a letter to the editor that I may or may not publish in the feedback section. After that, it will be too late to retract it. If you disagree with something I said, please quote it and cite the web page where you found it, tell me why you think it is wrong, and, if possible, provide some supporting evidence. Threatening to kill me or spouting obscenities has yet to persuade me to change my mind.
	Canadian Mind Products
	mindprod.com IP:[65.110.21.43]
view Blog	Your face IP:[38.107.179.213]
Feedback	You are visitor number 9,313.