Back in the early 2000s, I had a “business” which involved selling the internet retail-style – on CD discs. I made agreements with content providers – sites like algolist, openbsd, and culinary recipes, to place a banner on every page saying “buy this site on CD”, and in return, I invested time in creating a static version with search functionality and disc recording. The links from the pages led to .nadiske.ru, where there was a big “order” button and up-selling from other projects, related and not. A percentage from each disc went to the content owner. Delivery was done via COD (Cash on Delivery) through Russian Post (meaning, I sent CDs without a pre-payment) and I received the money at the post office. The site effectively had two pages – a product list with checkboxes and an order form. Yet, there were as many subsites as there were partners – on each, the main product was listed first, and the rest were offered as upsells. The gamble was that since “if we’re ordering already, let’s add something else”.
Now, there arose several interesting problems then. How to match money from posts with orders? For each order, I dynamically generated a price – added cents to make the price unique. For the end customer, there was no difference whether to agree on a price of 150 rubles or 150 rubles and 12 kopecks, but it was convenient for me to match. Along with the date, this was quite reliable.
The second problem was where to manage orders with statuses and other details. Eventually, I chose Microsoft Access. It pulled XML with new orders from the website. I developed the whole system on Access in just a couple of hours. It was ideal. By the way, has Access died already?
Interestingly, the best-selling discs were the ones I just mass-produced to fill the assortment – Unix and Linux systems. Clearly, these didn’t have any links from partner sites, but they were often bought as add-ons, and eventually, they topped sales charts 😉 and were the simplest and cheapest to produce.
I closed the project when it became clear that decent internet would eventually be brought to regions and the demand for the discs would someday dwindle. And it was all heading there. Plus, the discs required updates, and it was necessary to invest effort and time, which were regrettable to spend (especially considering the first point).
