There are some excellent free cgi-perl script programs that allow you to run your own visitor statistics reports, page hit counters, swap images for webpages, track referrers or trace followed links, convert the text and info on web-page fill-out "forms" into email it will automatically send to you (or whomever you specify), or run shopping cart and inventory control systems!

How should your ecommerce site look and work? See dack.com for an excellent study!

There are 3 general families of CGI scripts, those that simply do one generic task, like converting forms into email and sending it, those that maintain their own databases, like counters and trackers, saving results to a special server file(s) they can read from and write to, and those that require extra server side includes (SSI) in order to customize shtml-type webpages for viewing (like image swapping). SSI can be turned on easily by your hosting provider, if needed.

This page is a shtml page, and here is the date and time you requested it, provided by our servers SSI method - Tuesday, 08-Jul-08 22:15:39 EDT! Every time this page is loaded by someone, the server "includes" the time where that command was placed in it. This slows down the serving of the page a bit, but also allows powerful changes to be made to your pages by other scripts that may be installed on the server!

Each CGI script has it's own peculiarities and interpreter requirements, some are very, very simple. You can find a large variety of free CGI scripts at Matt's Script Archive and at The CGI Resource Index.

Taking payments by credit card, and managing inventory is a complex task, and much of this technology is still in it's infancy. Banks are downright unfriendly to small merchant startups in this field. They have set very high thresholds for anyone to set up their own small-scale payment system, so the easiest way is to accept paying a small percantage of your prices as "fees" to a large online billing firm -letting them deal with customers and their banks. Fraud, security and chargebacks are the major problems here, and it's difficult for a small merchant to avoid getting stung by them.

You could pay many thousands of dollars to have a programmer write or modify some other generic scripts or program a custom specialized system for your online store, but you'd probably just be asking for months of waiting, cost overruns and likely an inferior result compared to some good ones you can now get free or buy ready made!

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