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Feature Article - Getting Started With a
Shopping Cart
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| "How
do I add a shopping cart to my
website" is a frequently asked
question from WebStudio owners. How
to actually add a cart is important, but
not as important as knowing what to
add. That may seem like a strange
statement, but knowing what shopping cart
you'll need and what pieces you have to
have is a bigger question that the
mechanics of adding the cart to a site.
This article gives you an overview of
what's involved with what to add. |
| Shopping
Carts and Credit Card purchasing are not a
function of the software, it is a function
of your hosting company, a credit card
gateway, and a bank. |
| First,
the shopping cart software is provided by
3rd party companies. Some that are used by
WebStudio customers include PayPal and
EasyCart. There are a bunch of others.
What happens is the shopping cart company
provides you with graphics and HTML. You
add that to your WebStudio pages. You
don't have to know the HTML, just add what
they give you to WebStudio. In some cases
you'll have to modify the HTML but you
won't have to understand what it means or
does. An example would be to add the names
of your products, prices, sku numbers,
etc. But that is easy. |
| Secondly
the cart software is the software that
provides sales incentives features such as
sales, cross product promotions, gift
certificates, coupon redemptions, etc. So
you'll want to make sure the service you
purchase has those features, if you want
them. |
| Shopping
Cart Components |
| The
first component of an e-commerce site is
the product catalog. These are the pages
that contain pictures or lists of your
product. They also contain descriptions of
your products, price, product sku number,
etc. |
| Next
is the page typically called the Shopping
Cart. This page displays the items the
customer has placed in their cart as well
as individual and total prices. |
| You'll
have to know who your customer is. That is
the function of the registration page, or
customer info page. This is where the
customer enters their name, address, and
other contact info. |
| If you are going to
ship
product, you'll have some place where the
customer enters their shipping address and
the shipping method they want. |
| Next
is the payment page. This page asks for
the person's credit card number, type and
expiration date. Some carts with good
fraud protection features also ask for the
billing address. This is the address that
is found on the credit card's billing
statement. It is a good idea to have this
type of protection with internet commerce! |
| Finally,
there is the order confirmation page. This
is where the customer finds out if the
transaction was approved by their credit
card company, gets further instructions,
receives receipt numbers, etc. |
| Note
that each of these pages may actually be
incorporated into other pages. For example
the Shipping and Billing addresses may be
on the same page. Or, everything could be
on the same page. The thing to remember is
that these components are those necessary
to do e-commerce on your site. |
| What
Else is Required? |
| Credit
cards: There are a few pieces to to this.
First, you need a merchant account
at your bank. This is a business
checking account that accepts the funds
from the credit card transactions. And,
the merchant account must be capable of
handling real-time-internet
transactions,
not just transactions from a card swiping
machine. |
| Next,
you need a credit card
gateway. This connects your ordering
software to the credit card company's
computer and then back to your bank. |
| Next
is the secure server for the pages that gather
the information for the order; name,
address, credit card #, as discussed
above. The secure
server encrypts the information so no one
can steal it when it is transmitted over
the net. You do not want to have any
customer information entered on non-secure
pages! |
| Some
hosting companies offer shopping carts for
their customers. Some Shopping Cart
companies host it themselves and your site
just links to it from your hosting
service. An alternative, a difficult
alternative, is for you to host it
yourself. But you'll need to have your own
hosting company to do it! Any of these
work fine. The cart company's website
would have a "control panel"
that allows you to add product to the
catalog, set
shipping info, tax info, etc. These carts
would then create the pages of your
catalog for you. Other carts make you do
that by modifying HTML on your pages, you
create the catalog's pages. The first way
lets you do it easier, the second lets you
have more control over how it all looks. |
| Some
banks and gateway company's have an all in
one approach to the credit card gateway,
merchant account and secure pages. You
order their service and they give you
secure pages on their site that a customer
is sent to when they click Buy
on your site. It gets the appropriate info
from the customer, then sends it thru the
gateway to the credit card company for
approval. If it is approved, the customer
is informed, the funds are transferred to
your account, everyone that touched the
transaction takes their cut,
you and the customer are informed that
they have purchased something, what it is,
and where to ship it. |
| We
use Wells Fargo Bank for our merchant
account and gateway. We host our own
secure server and pages. Wells Fargo has a
complete product line of services from the
simple to complex. |
| The
advantages of doing it with a bank that
handles it all for you is it is very
simple and quick to get up and running.
The disadvantages is you lose some control
over the purchasing process. But, you may
not want that extra level of
control...also known as paper work. |
| So,
to answer your questions, Yes WebStudio
can handle all of this. You'll have to
decide on a shopping cart to use, and a
vendor for the credit card pieces. |
| For
help with Adding the components of
your new cart to your site, go to our on-line forum at http://www.webstudioforum.com.
Post a message in
the WebStudio Forum section asking for
help with shopping carts and credit card
processing when using WebStudio. 35% of
the people with business sites that use
WebStudio have shopping carts and credit
card capabilities on their sites. Many of
them frequent the forum and are more than
eager to help you get started looking for
the right pieces and then help you get it
all running when you build your site. |
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Tips
and Techniques...
|
| Adding
Links to your Object and Text that Open
New Windows |
| Many
people have been asking how to set up a
link so that when it is clicked on it
opens the new page in a new browser
window. |
| If
you're still learning about how to use
links, refer to last month's column titled
"How
to Add Hyperlinks to WebStudio Objects." |
| It
is actually very simple. You just add a
little HTML to the link. There are a few
different ways to do it however, depending
on how and what you are adding the link
to. |
| Regardless
of how you do it, the HTML is the same.
Here's the HTML to be added to your links. |
| "target="first_window |
| You
enter it exactly as it is written above,
including the quotes, and no,
there is no missing quote at the end.
WebStudio takes care of that one for you. |
| Now
that you know what HTML to use, here's the
different techniques for adding it. |
| Doing
it with an existing link in a graphic
object |
| To
add it to a graphic object that already
has a link on it, simply right click
on the object, choose Properties,
click on the Link tab and type
"target="first_window right
after the existing link. So, if the
existing link were: |
| http://www.webstudio.com |
| Doing
it with a link to one of the pages in your
site |
| First
you can only do this with a link on a
graphic, not on text. To do it, right
click on the object, choose Properties,
click on the Link tab. Then
enter the page's name with a
".html" after it and then add
our HTML. If your page has a space
in its name, substituted an underscore
for the space. Also, if you want it to
work when you Preview your page,
enter "htm" instead of
"html". Once you have previewed
it, change it back to ".html" so
the link will work correctly when the page
is on the web. So, assuming your page was
named "Page 5" you'll enter the
following:
|
| Page_5.html"target="first_window |
| Then,
a click on that link will open Page
5 in a new window
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Manage
Your Subscription
|
You are receiving this newsletter because
you are a registered user of Web Studio or
because you indicated you are interested in
learning about products like Web Studio.
To subscribe or unsubscribe from this
newsletter, please visit our
subscription management page. |
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President's Corner
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| This
month we feature an overview of how to add
a shopping cart to your website. This
overview gives you the high level picture
so you can see how to proceed with
researching available carts and
determining what you need. |
| How
to split your website is our big tip of
the month. While the Did You Know
column revisits some old topics that seem
to keep coming up in our tech support and
forum discussions. |
| We
hope all of this will come in handy! |
|
Steve Cochard
President
Back to the Beach Software, LLC |
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Site of
the Month Contest Winner
|
nanoweb's
muebles
site |
Congratulations
to muebles,
our Site of the Month for July! Nanoweb's
"muebles" is an Guatemalan
e-commerce site to purchase furniture
online. Our judges said it is,
"most professional looking site...it
demonstrates capabilities of WebStudio with
pop-up windows, Flash and javascript." |
|
Make sure you
check out nanoweb's site
and remember you can ask nanoweb how
it was all done in the WebStudio
Forum! |
|
And for those of
you thinking of submitting a site, this is a
reminder that we're halfway through August -
so
click here to submit your site now! |
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Did You
Know
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|
...that
you can split your site into two and link
them together as one? |
| Why
would you want to split your site into two
or mort parts? If you have a medium to
large site that has multiple subjects it
may make sense to split it up. If you have
multiple people working on your site, it
may make sense to split it and have each
person work with their part, and let the
links make it look like one site. |
| There
two basic steps to splitting a site into
two or more parts. First, you have to
upload your "main" site as the
"root site" when you Save Site
To Internet. This makes the home page (index.html
page) on the "main" site the one
that people go to when they go to your
site. |
| With
the "second site" you have to
make sure you DON'T upload it as the
"root" site. Doing this will
place it in a separate folder and allow
your "main" site to exist
peacefully with the "second"
site. |
| You
can specify uploading as the Root site in
the Site Properties Dialog's Advanced Tab
or you can do it in the Publishing Wizard,
during uploading. |
| As
far as linking, you have to add a link to
the MyLinks section of the Links gallery
to enable you to link your main site to
the second site. |
| Let's
say your website's address is http://www.webstudio.com.
Lets say you named you second site,
"second" and your main site is
named "main". Let's also say the
"home" page in the second site
is "cat".
|
| You'd
add a link to MyLinks that is http://www.webstudio.com/second/cat.html |
| This
is because the second site is uploaded
onto you site and put into a folder named
"second" and the page you want
to link to, cat, is inside that folder and
has a file extension of ".html".
|
|
For
each link you want to have from the main
site to the second site, just a link to
MyLinks using the procedure above. When you
want to add one of those links to a button,
text or what-have-you, just drag it from
MyLinks onto the appropriate object.
That's it!
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What's
New Online
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|
New Downloadable Clip Art |
|
Visit
the Content
Gallery on the Webstudio.com website to download
the new clipart. There are 50 collections of
clipart listed by name, about 4000 graphics,
over 40mb of content. These clipart
collections have not been included in
any previous version of WebStudio. So,
everyone who is interested in additional
content should take a look and download what
you want. |
|
Each
collection has been organized as one, modem
friendly sized installer. Just Click on the
name of a collection and the installer will
download and install it directly into your
WebStudio ClipArt Gallery. The new
collection will appear as a sub-folder at
the beginning of your gallery. |
|
A Taste of Some the Clipart Collections |
|
Alphabets,
Animals, Art, Books, Classrooms, Computers,
Corners, Dinos, Education, Ethnic, Fantasy,
Festive, Film, Food, History, Holidays,
Insects, Kids, Landmarks, Magic, Monsters,
Music, Mythology, Ornaments, Outdoors,
Pencils, Pets, Plants, Professions, School,
Science, Space, Sports, Transport, Weather,
Words, World. |
|
Deleting a Clip Art Category |
|
If
you decide later that you don't want a
category a little know Keyboard trick will
enable you to Delete any individual
collection. Here's how: |
|
Click
on the ClipArt tab in the galleries. Find
the category's thumbnail that you want to
delete. Press and hold down the CTRL key and
right click the mouse on the thumbnail.
Choose Delete from the resulting menu. You
will be asked if you are sure you want to
delete it, click OK. |
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