Has anyone used Aware to develop Public facing site?

BenHayat

Hi;

As the title says, has anyone built a web application that not only perform business processes and transaction (like most Intranet apps) but also develop the public facing pages that are more sales and marketing oriented and involves the usage of HTML heavily?

If yes, how has been the user experience and how was the experience of building it?

I need to also build a small shopping cart and use Paypal for payment processing. Has anyone done successful Paypal integration?

For those who have long term experience, would you even recommend using Aware for building Public facing sites?

Your input and feedback is greatly appreciated, so I can decide to build it all in Aware or use a third party eCommerce product like Shopify or etc.

Thank you in advance!

kklosson

While AwareIM is an awesome tool with nearly limitless usefulness, I would say that it is target to the development of business applications. If you look at the AwareIM.com web site, it is a mix of marketing and payment processing - the payment processing part being served by an AwareIM app.

I would recommend you follow that or a similar model. Most of your public facing site likely does not require business logic, just good presentation and navigation., which can be done with ease using traditional tools.

BenHayat

kklosson wrote
While AwareIM is an awesome tool with nearly limitless usefulness, I would say that it is target to the development of business applications. If you look at the AwareIM.com web site, it is a mix of marketing and payment processing - the payment processing part being served by an AwareIM app.

I would recommend you follow that or a similar model. Most of your public facing site likely does not require business logic, just good presentation and navigation., which can be done with ease using traditional tools.

Thanks for the confirmation. That also has been my primary direction, but I wanted to see if anyone else has also taken Aware for the other direction as well.

I'm evaluating Aware now and had not used their site's payment system yet. Although Aware's sales & marketing was done in some PHP system, are you saying they redirect to an Aware app for payment processing?

If yes, this would solve a big problem for me, because if I could accept payment in my SaaS app (written in Aware), then I can update my customer's record automatically since I'm connected to the same database and Business Space.

kklosson

I don't know for sure, but it looks like they've embedded the AwareIM payment app into their payment page and they use PayPal to process the payment. I'm pretty sure there is either a plugin or something native in AwareIM to facilitate the PayPal exchange.

I just keep the two functions separate and use a standard site for marketing and payment.

BenHayat

kklosson wrote
I just keep the two functions separate and use a standard site for marketing and payment.

And when a customer makes payment in your Sales site, you just manually update your Aware app that a payment was rendered?

As of now, that has been my approach to use like BigCommerce or Volusion for Sales/marketing and in my SaaS app, update Tenants account manually when I get payment.
But I'm also thinking if I can automate that, without getting into something deep that wasn't worth it.

It's always great to get feedback from folks like you.
Thank you Sir!

kklosson

My app has large accounts and high fees. Low volume/high rate. So it's easy this way. Different circumstances may require a different approach.

BenHayat

kklosson wrote
My app has large accounts and high fees.

Nice! 🙂