The Ordering Process: Web Orders
Web orders, which comprise over 90% of the Business’s orders, come to the
Business in the following way. A customer browses the Business’s website, which is
hosted on a shared server at a commercial hosting facility. This site is running an opensource
shopping cart system written in Perl and heavily modified by the owner’s
husband. When the customer submits an order, the order is filed in an order log and
two emails are sent. The customer gets an order summary (minus credit card
information); the owner gets a terse note that says simply “You have an order, Boss.”
The owner then FTP’s to the server from the Big Mac and downloads the order
log. After verifying that it looks correct and complete, she replaces the server’s order
log with a blank document. The orders in the order log are then split into separate
documents, printed, and saved, named by customer name and order date, into an
“Orders” directory on the hard drive of the Big Mac.
The printed copy of the order, containing all customer information, is placed onto an “Orders” clipboard.