[ic] Interchange with Phonecards

[Mike Heins]

Quoting Ammar T. Al-Sayegh (ammar@kunet.com):
> Hello Everyone,
> 
> We have a Phonecards store and we would like to offer
> our customers the ability to purchase our Phonecards
> online for convenience. I have installed Interchange
> on our server and was able to hook it up with MySQL
> and run the demo store. However, I see that the
> current configuration of Interchange is geared towards
> selling physical items which are shipped via courier,
> but our objective is not to ship the cards physically
> by snail mail, but send their access codes via email
> instantly once the credit card is approved. Also, we
> would like to our customers to have accounts on our
> site in which they can log in and preview the access
> codes of the cards the previously purchased.
> 
> Has anyone tried this implementation on Interchange
> before? if not then can Interchange be modified to have
> this capability? and if this is possible, are there
> individuals with the technical expertise who might be
> willing to do it for us for a reasonable fee?
> 

We don't get as many "can Interchange do this" questions as we used to.
I don't know if we have gotten the word out or what, but the basic
answer is:

    Interchange can do just about anything you can dream up.

In the right hands, it can get something like that up faster than any
other off-the-shelf software I know of. Of course I have gotten pretty
good at it, and am a bit biased, but there are a couple of dozen other
people I know who could do what you need in a matter of hours (providing
you can tie to your auth server easily).

The app you talk about I just did (well, sort of). It sells the Premium
Service at freecell.com -- when people get sick of seeing ads with
Freecell they can buy the ads off for $12 per year, getting an
authorization code. What makes this like phone cards is that there is an
auth cycle on the main web site, where the ID is not activated until the
money is collected.

So the short answer is: yes, it can. I did the above in just a couple
hours of work. Someone else did the authentication code -- all I had to
do was plug it into IC.

-- 
Mike Heins
Perusion -- Expert Interchange Consulting    http://www.perusion.com/
phone +1.513.523.7621      <mike@perusion.com>

Function in chaos, finish in style. -- Unknown