Week in Review

This week, Steve from TPS came out and showed us how to work the Excel Spreadsheet out. He provided us with clear instructions and clear definitions in how the program works. Additionally, this week we have a response on the telephone conversation guideline so i am working on a list of contacts to call.
Finally, our team is responsible for creating the Gantt chart, the pert chart and the likes. We will break down the work amongst us and have it done be potentially next week.

Week in Review

This week has been successful in that we have implemented a solid strategy to attain partners to the new eCommerce branch of TPS. We have written up a Word Doc. in a way that will act as a guideline for all of us to contact companies and inquire about certain products and their ability to form a partnership. We have also came up with a list of 10 key questions to ask when we either call/email the companies that we are certain will help in our research for a top shopping cart.

Goals for the Week

Starting the week off, continuing further research and narrowing down from our current list of 10 to 2 or 3 top names.
Miva merchant e-mailed me back with multiple answers. They do handle gift cards and coupon codes. He also mentioned that Miva's software is modular based, meaning it is extremely customizable.
They have been in the ecommerce industry for 12 years and and have over 50,000 active users.

For the rest of the week: call more companies and ask if we can process their payments.

Research Conducted

In this short week, the time was consumed by conducting research on two of my assigned companies. Miva Merchant and IBM Websphere Commerce. There was a lot of conflict revolving around finding the information regarding whether or not the aforementioned companies are able to support the processing of Gift Cards and Loyalty Cards in addition to the standard Credit Card.
Contacting the companies was not an issue, however finding capable people to answer the question was.
Overall, most information was available and you just had to know where to look. The Miva Merchant site was a lot more user friendly then IBM's tho.

Goal for the rest of this week: Research further into the companies that i submitted to the class Spreadsheet. Weed out ones that will not fit within the criteria of the project scope.

Update

Picked out 8 basic shopping carts that i delved into and found more information. Unfortunately, a lot of the website will not answer most questions that are necessary to our research. In fact, because some of the shopping cart are small companies, their web sites are only a page long.