Chuck and I met up for a follow-up meeting. John was in the background and chimed in through chat and even through audio at times. We started out and I passed the existing cart details and functions document over to Chuck. I would still like to get to more of it, but it already has pages of good data and information about the current shopping cart, ecommerce, flow, settings, functions, usage, and requirements.

We switched over and Chuck was showing me some of his research. We talked about promo videos, went over screenshots from our competition, and talked about pros and cons. Great little discussion. We also talked about options for mixing CRM and POS stuff together (customer relationship management and point of sale systems - CRM and POS).

How much info do you show, what is needed, where do you put the stuff you don't need, what about real estate and mobile friendly or responsive options, etc.? Lots of options and choices. We also talked about ecommerce, cart abandonment, possible usage of global CRM (our whole network), and possible payment options. Really good topics and discussions. With the payment options, we even talked about - what if we did our own payment solution. That could be really cool, and it could be a money maker as well, say a small percentage of each transaction.

The meeting was going over all kinds of neat ideas, slick features, speed, and optimization enhancements. We also briefly talked about the need for more bulk ecommerce tools, need for different themes, layouts, etc. You can see that it was heading towards more data driven settings and then making the new carts respond and run based off of the data input instead of hard coding things. We spent quite a bit of time talking about themes, colors, custom styles (fun, clean, classy, business, punk/trashy, etc.), and putting those options in our client's hands.

As part of our discussion, we talked a lot about the my cart favorite buttons and being able to use super slick and clean buttons to help navigate the system. Basically, take the existing functionality of our buttons and give them a face lift to help them look better and be a little bit smoother. There is already a ton of power built into the buttons, they just need a little face lift and some loving.

Along with the simple buttons, Chuck really wants to make different modes for the cart. It could be so simple (button mode) that a person lives and dies on just a couple of small pages. Then, somebody else, who needs a more robust invoicing system could have all of the tools that they need at their disposal. Make things as fast as possible, as small as possible, but also have the depth and functions available if needed. That's the challenge.

We switched gears and started talking about video players, CDN's (content delivery networks) and linking to outside plugins and libraries. We got into a great discussion about upgrades, costs of maintaining older code, and keeping our clients moving along with us as we progress. It got into a great discussion about goals, short term, long term, and where we are wanting to go. This topic and conversation blead over into the next meeting as well.