So far we've built a variety of useful e-commerce tools. These include a product catalog, a customer information model, an order and shopping cart interface, and payment processors. These apps cover the customer interaction portion of the e-commerce selling process. In this chapter we will build a simple set of tools for handling the steps that come after we've received a customer's payment. This includes:
Updating/assigning status information to our orders
Using Google Checkout API's automatic payments system
Calculating shipping and handling charges
A simple CRM tool to allow customer feedback on orders
The process that happens after an order is completely submitted and paid for by the customer tends to be very specific to a company and the products they're selling. However, the outline above reflects typical areas of need in almost all e-commerce operations. As in the rest of this book, we will build a very simple set of tools with emphasis...