The Trade Pages ecommerce System.

One of the most important excuses that Forbairt/IDA used for reneging on IDA undertakings was the fact that the company had invested 30k in developing an ecommerce system. It should be noted that they had already reneged on their undertakings quite some time before they found this excuse.

The executives involved viewed the expenditure on ecommerce as a waste of company resources and the idea of selling goods on the internet a laughable folly. This was 1996 and they simply did not understand what we were talking about and they were arrogant enough to think that they knew what was best for our business.

The project arose from my interest in computing going back over many years. We wanted to get away from our reliance on Gauselmann and one way we thought to do this was to use the Internet. As there were no suitable ecommerce systems available at that time we decided to develop one.

Initially we employed a software company from Kerry and that was an expensive mistake. We were then lucky enough to find Mr. Peter Flynn from UCC who is Irelands foremost expert on this technology. Peter became main consultant for the project. Scripting was initially done by FMA Ltd in Edinburgh who at the time were webmasters for the UK ISP Demon. Later we scripted in-house. The server system ran on a UNIX/Apache server and was written in PERL and used a mSQL database. Were such a system to be developed today it would more likely to use PHP/MySQL rather than PERL/mSQL but nonetheless the system would be familiar today to anybody who has bought anything online.

The system was also capable of handling wholesale distribution and operated a pricing matrix that allowed for prices to be specific to specific clients.

While the system allowed companies to have their own ecommerce system such as www.yourshop.com all products would also be displayed in the Trade Pages Directory which contained all of the products in all of the shops. The Trade Pages directory was designed in categories so you would have Trade Pages Billiards, Trade Pages Tennis, Trade Pages Golf and so on. The system was light weight on resources and could scale up to many hundreds of thousands of products.

As Billiard Tables are such big products the logistics element in the system was very important to us. We wanted the system to be able to quote including delivery to anywhere based on weight and volume. This was particularly important to North America where we hoped the Mantis would sell well.

As bandwidth was so bad in those days we also developed a Windows client system to allow companies to manage their product information off line. This also made the system practical for companies with very large product ranges. Another advantage was that the client system allowed for the management of print catalog output.

At one point Forbairt did send someone down to look at the system. It was obvious that he was of the opinion that Software could only be developed by large numbers of programmers and he did not really understand what we were talking about in any case. After this meeting he sent us this letter.

We are currently working on a guide to understanding "IDA/Enterprise Ireland Speak" and their way of writing letters.
In this case I do not think a translation is necessary.