[8797] in APO News
BookEx, TechCASH, The Intorweb, and You
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mitchell E Berger)
Fri Jun 16 17:52:49 2006
To: apo-news@MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2006 17:52:31 -0400
From: Mitchell E Berger <mitchb@MIT.EDU>
Hey Everyone,
At Joint Exec, a sort of mandate was reached that in order to justify
the effort we put into BookEx, in light of all the current alternatives
to using our own Book Exchange, we need to be attracting more sellers and
customers by offering something unique that none of the others do (and
ideally that none of the others can). Already the fact that we take
TechCASH is a good start, but more and more people seem to like the web.
Wouldn't it be cool if our customers could buy stuff from BookEx with
TechCASH on the web?
I was asked to investigate the possibility of doing this. It's basically
uncharted territory, which is to say that there are zero merchants currently
able to take TechCASH online. We're about to be the first! As of earlier
today, we have permission from MIT to move forward with this project and
take TechCASH online this Fall. How well this works out may affect not
only us and Enterprise Services, but also any other groups that would like
to sell items online with TechCASH in the future.
And so, we come to the point... we have some work to do, starting right
now. Perhaps you want to help, where "help" is defined as participating in
some subset of these things:
o BookEx will need to be a little different this year in order to accomodate
people buying books online. We need to figure out how our policies and
procedures are going to change to make everything run smoothly for us
and for the customers.
o The software we use for BookEx will need some modification to integrate
transaction handling, user recognition, sale notifications, customer
shopping carts, etc., and will need to be evaluated for user-friendliness
because we're no longer going to be the only ones who need to work with
it. We need to figure out what the changes are going to be, and we need
to make them.
o There will need to be some dialog with the company that makes the
backend software we'll be interacting with to issue charges.
o We'll need to have well-informed people acting as responsible parties
during the Book Exchange to make sure that we do everything correctly
and know the answers to any questions that may come up.
o We also need to deal with everything I may have forgotten to mention.
If you want to help out, you should be on the list bookex-web, which will
start getting more detailed information and discussing things probably later
this weekend. If you want to be on the list, let me know (and if you have
ideas of what you'd like to help with, tell me that, too), or ask someone
on apo-acl to add you.
YiLiteratureFinancingServices,
Mitch
