I'm going to block access to the carts on Friday. No support on the cart will be given from here on, other than providing you with the software and some pointers to installing it. I realize there are some outstanding issues with the PriceTag server changes, but these should not impact on the cart.
The exam questions' intention were to make you think about the other side of ecommerce - putting up a cart is one thing, having a plan of action is another. On a live payment site I'm involved with, we've had many people who did not want to pay online. You need to provide another way of paying for them. Few sites do. How will this impact on your administration if 200 people pay by transfers on a single? Will you be able to handle it effectively? What I'm saying is that the cart on its won should never be seen as a total solution. We cannot prepare you for ecommerce - we can only give you the theory and the practical experience. The rest is up to you since every implementation brings along its own unique problems, and hopefully, solutions. But if you think just having a site up on the Internet is going to make you money, then think again. You probably did not read enough. Effective planning and marketing is required. Having a sticker on your car promoting the site, referring people to your site on your answering machine etc etc.
Also, rather than providing you with a step-by-step guide to using the cart, we left some secrets for you to discover. It was wonderful to see that some of you used the forum as intended - not always as a request for support, but as a tool to share the knowledge you've gained. One learns by discovering.
We trust you enjoyed the course. If anything, we'd like to believe you are comfortable with a shopping cart and understand how it works, since all carts work on more or less the same principles. Its not rocket science per se. But hopefully the course provided you with a safe environment to test ecommerce as an option. That is valuable in itself.
