St. Pat's Online

St. Patrick's website was created 3 months after the introduction of the World Wide Web in 1993. St. Pat's online shopping cart was introduced in 1994.

St. Pat's shopping cart is Client-based (not server-based). Client-based software (aka Web 2.0) is the foundation of the most recent Internet expansion (YouTube, MySpace and all similar sites). The fact that St. Pats software was written a decade before the advent of those sites speaks to the creativity of Howard Tsoi and Gavin Scott who originally developed our software.

The original ideas for the cart and tons of work came from Howard Tsoi, then with National Instruments. Howard did our first web page back in 1993 (this is same year the World Wide Web became a public internet system). Later, Gavin Scott (who also worked for St. Pat's on and off for years) took over and added some wonderful features to the shopping cart. Gavin now has his own small business that writes all the code for online poker at pokerpages.com Gavin is too busy to babysit us. So Paul Mitchell (Gavin's friend) has taken over and has made some invisible but significant improvements such as helping UPS integrate their software, building our online inventory system, and many other seamless small items that go unnoticed to the customer.

Our client-based shopping cart is unique. Here are some of the features.

Imagine going to the grocery store and everytime you place an item in your basket, you must go to the front of the store and have it scanned. Then back you go ad nauseum for more items. This is analagous to the manner in which virtually every shopping cart on the web operates. (These shopping carts are server-based.) What makes our cart unique is that it operates much like you do at the grocery store. You fill your basket and we scan all the items once at the final checkout.

Speed
The most irritating problem with server-based shopping carts is snail like pace. This is largely due to the fact that everytime you buy an item, your computer communicates with the server which then answers back. We solve this problem by putting the shopping basket in your browser while you shop (client-based), thus avoiding all those time consuming communications with the server. When you first click on the button next to an item, a shopping basket will appear in the bottom right corner of your page.

Pricing
The shopping cart provides you with a running subtotal of your purchases. It calculates sales tax (for TX residents only--there is no tax for those outside Texas). It does not calculate freight charges.

Notes Window
Another useful feature is the notes window for every item. If you have any special instructions for a particular item, please include them in the notes window next to it in the shopping basket. Don't worry if they scroll off the screen--we'll get the full text.

Selecting Items, Updating Quantity, and Deleting Items from the Basket
Add items to your shopping basket by clicking on a button. You can change the quantity of any item in the basket itself. Use the TAB button (on your keyboard) to update changes in the quantity or you can use the Update button. If there are quantity discounts, these will automatically be calculated. Use the button to delete an item from the basket.

Buying the Goods
When you are ready to place your order click "Done/Place Order".