Book Image

Django 1.2 E-commerce

By : Jesse Legg
Book Image

Django 1.2 E-commerce

By: Jesse Legg

Overview of this book

<p>Django is a high-level Python web framework that was developed by a fast-moving online-news operation to meet the stringent twin challenges of newsroom deadlines and the needs of web developers. It provides an excellent basis to build e-commerce websites because it can be deployed fast and it responds quickly to changes due to its ability to handle content problems. Django with its proven strengths is all you need to build powerful e-commerce applications with a competitive edge. <br /><br />This book explores how the Django web framework and its related technologies can power the next leap forward for e-commerce and business on the Web. It shows you how to build real-world applications using this rapid and powerful development tool.<br /><br />The book will enable you to build a high quality e-commerce site quickly and start making money. It starts with the ambitious task of using Django to build a functional e-commerce store in less than 30 minutes, and then proceeds to enhance this design through the rest of the book. The book covers the basics of an e-commerce platform like product catalogs, shopping carts, and payment processing. By the end of the book, you will be able to enhance the application by adding a fully-functional search engine, generating PDF-based reports, adding interactivity to the user-interface, selling digital goods with micropayments, and managing deployment and maintenance tasks.</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Django 1.2 e-commerce
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Digital goods sales


Selling digital goods is trickier than subscription sales. For one, the user normally downloads a digital asset after making their purchase. This may be a music or video file, but it could also be a software download, a serial number and/or a registration key.

Providing downloads complicates the matter in part because of potential for delays in payment authorization. When selling a physical product, there is usually time between the purchase request and packaging and shipping. This interval allows the payment processor to authorize and charge payment.

Most users expect a digital download almost immediately, leaving us little time to verify whether the user's payment is legitimate. This opens the possibility for fraud or other failure states. Fortunately, the big payment processing services have taken many steps to solve these problems with little inconvenience to the customer or our application's usability.

After purchase, customers are typically given a special URL download...