eTorrent GmbH

11.09.08

Publication from eTorrent colleagues

Two eTorrent members of staff, namely Henrik Stormer and Daniel Frauchiger, have published an article about current trends in Online Shopping in the German journal HMD Praxis der Wirtschaftsinformatik". The article is entitled "Aktuelle Entwicklungen elektronischer Shopsysteme" and describes current trends in eCommerce.

31.05.07

Google Gears

Today Google Gears was launched. Google Gears is a service consisting of a browser plugin (currently, Internet Explorer and Firefox are supported) and a small Javascript library. Google Gears could be used to enable offline web applications. There are different modules available, for example a local server to store resources or a small relational database. We played a bit with Gears and wrote some tests for a small application that can be used to store the product catalogue offline. This application would be useful for sales representatives, that want to show their products to customers. Using this functionality, no internet connection is required. Other applications are also possible, for example offline ordering or offline product management.

28.04.07

FAVICON

We finally made a favourite icon using our blue "e". If you are interested in doing your own for your web site, we recommend the page HTML Kit where you can upload an image that is used to create an icon.

10.04.07

eSarine and Barcodes

Currently, we are working on a solution to connect a barcode reader with eSarine. The idea is to automate the process of adding new orders. All barcode numbers are assigned to products. When the barcode reader is used to read a number, the description of the product is automatically loaded and displayed. We will keep you informed about this.

28.03.07

No News? On the contrary...

For a long time, we did not post any news. This is not because eTorrent has no work to do, on the contrary, we have been quite busy within the last month. We will move to new servers shortly, have a number of new customers and a lot of work to do. We will keep you informed (hopefully)...

11.08.06

Google Checkout

Google has launched a new service, Google Checkout, which seems very interesting for shop owners. We registered some weeks ago and we have tested this service. The shop connexion is very simple. Note that Google promote for free the online shops which uses Google Checkout because these shops are displayed with a special symbol.

24.05.06

FriUp Membership

We are happy to announce that today, the eTorrent GmbH has become a member of FriUp. FriUp is the center for startup companies, that is founded by the canton Fribourg and the government of Switzerland.

10.03.06

New Web Page

We did a complete redesign of our eTorrent webpages. Hopefully, you like the new design as much as we do.

15.01.06

AJAX in eSarine

We finished our first Ajax extention for eSarine. It is now possible to quickly search for products, users and orders using the well known Ajax suggest box. Our customers really like this new functionality as they can now access these objects much faster. The figure shows what happens if you want to edit a product which name begins with the letter A.

10.12.05

AJAX Book

14.11.05

AJAX is coming to eSarine

During the last weeks, we experimented a bit with the new Ajax technology. We want to add Ajax to the back part of the eSarine shop to improve the usability and performance. We hope we can say more in the next month.

09.11.05

Rampinelli - Another customer goes with eSarine

21.05.05

eDVDShop is Online

It is done. Our Demo Shop is online and can be found under http://www.edvdshop.ch. Feel free to order some DVDs. If you are interested in the administration side of eSarine, please do not hesitate to contact us.

24.02.05

Struts Recipes Book

Yesterday we received our copy of the Struts Recipes by George Franciscus and Danilo Gurovich. This book covers a number of tips and tricks you can use when implementing with Apache Struts. We strongly recommend this book as it is a major help for all people who want to seriously implement web applications with Apache Struts. Additionally, it is nice to see that we already did some of the tips on our own, for example the message storage in a database.

22.02.05

Something about SSL

Maybe you already know that enabling SSL can be done quite easily using web servers like Apache or Tomcat. Then, a webpage is available on two different ports: 80 (the standard http port) and 443 (the SSL port, available using https). The encryption is only done if the page is loaded using port 443. However, usually a page should be available only on one protocol: http or https. If you want to enable such a service and you use the Struts framework, we recommend the Struts SSL package. You can define for all requests if http or https should be used. The redirection is done automatically by Struts SSL.

18.01.05

Identifying the Customer

One important issue for online shop operators is to know how often customers visit the store. Web users can be identified using a cookie. This is a small file that is stored on the users harddisk together with the URL that sent the cookie. When the user returns to the site later, the web browser sends the cookie automatically to the web server.

It is possible to add additional information in a cookie, for example the user identification number, the username or the eMail. However, as the user can edit the cookie, this should not be done to protect against a possible attack from the user (who pretends to be someone else).

A good idea is to store the HTTP session number of the current HTTP session in the cookie. If this number is also saved in the database of the web server (together with the userid), the web browser of a returning user sends the session number to the web server. The web server can determine the userid by querying the database for the session number.

The security of this mechanism relies on the randomness and length of the session number. In a positive case, it is impossible for a user to guess a different existing session number in the database.

12.01.05

Bringing Tooltips to Life

Tooltips are used on standalone applications for showing additional information to elements. The picture shows a tooltip for the print button in the popular development environment Eclipse:

These tooltips can also be used in a web envrionment. If, for example, a tooltip should be presented on an image, the title attribute from HTML can be used.

In eSarine, tooltips are used in connection with links to show more information about the target of the link. One example is the page bar. The picture shows a product list, managed by eSarine and sorted by the name of the product:

As you can see, the tooltip shows which product will apear first when you click on the link. This is a good way to improve the usability without showing more information on the screen.

20.12.04

Product Comparison

A nice way to compare products can be done by choosing two products of the same type and presenting them in a table. The Media Markt Shop is a nice example.

For eSarine, we are currently developing the same functionality. Basically, this can be done as soon as you support product types to specify the different attributes of a product. This feature can be found in eSarine since the first version.

12.07.04

Order Management

The eSarine shop development continues. Right now, we are improving the order management, which could become quite complicated. Especially editing or removing of data could be a problem:

A customers orders some products to an address. Later he deletes the address. Should the order be sent to this (old) address?
A customer orders some products to an address. Later, he edits the address. Should the order be sent to the edited address?
A product is ordered with price x. Later, the product price is changed by the shop administrator to price y. However, the product must be delivered to the customer with price x.

The examples above have shown that almost all the order data has to be copied and saved.

As you can see, order management is problematic. It even gets worse when the customer can change his order. If, for example, changing is not possible but instead the old order is deleted and a new order is placed, products out of stock are quite difficult. Suppose a customer has orderered a product, where only a limited number are available. The product ran out of stock and cannot be reordered by the shop administrator. Then, if the strategy mentioned above is applied, the editing has no success as a new order cannot be placed.

06.07.04

eTorrent Blog starts

This is the first line of our new eTorrent blog. In this blog, we will give you hints about our current development of eSarine and the ongoing work of eTorrent.