Lightweight e-commerce with Cardbox

A small business, or a business whose main activity is not e-commerce, can run into trouble when selling things on the Web. Either it sells everything through a third party (Amazon for books, Handango for downloads, or even eBay) with high transaction costs, unfavourable contract terms, and hidden risks, or it pays a lot of money for a fully e-commerce-enabled web site when all it really needed was the ability to process a dozen or so transactions a day.

The Universalis case study shows how it is possible to start a small e-commerce business at virtually no cost (just the application fee for the credit card processor) and with virtually no programming (just a single Cardbox macro to process the orders as they come in by email).

This lightweight semi-automated approach is secure, fraud-proof, and requires very little time to manage.

64-bit Windows and fractal images

Cardbox is fully compatible with 64-bit editions of Windows, but there is one small exception.

If you have old databases that were created by versions 1 or 2 of Cardbox for Windows, and those databases contain images, and those images were stored with “fractal compression”, then those images will not be visible in 64-bit Windows. This is because the “helper” program for fractal images, made by the defunct company Iterated Systems, is a 16-bit program and Microsoft have removed support for 16-bit programs from 64-bit Windows.

This probably does not apply to you:

• Most people have created their databases with Cardbox 3.0, which doesn’t provide fractal compression for images.
• Most people who used Cardbox for Windows 1.0 and 2.0 did not use the Fractal option when storing images in their databases.
• Hardly anyone is buying 64-bit editions of Windows.

If you have old databases that contain images and you are contemplating a move to 64-bit Windows, this article provides a macro that will scan your database and convert “Fractal” images to a more modern form.

Symbol fonts in Cardbox

When you choose a font in Cardbox, it offers you a choice of all the normal fonts on your computer. By “normal fonts” we mean the ones in which letters look like letters. For instance, w might look like this:

A symbol font is one where the symbols you see don’t look anything like the letters you type. Here is the letter w as displayed in various different symbol fonts: