Shopping Cart Home Page

Introduction

This manual is provided to our merchants to serve as an additional guide to using the shopping cart services. We have made every attempt to offer a cart that is flexible, customizable, and powerful, yet has ease of use when implementing it on your site.

This manual contains a basic overview of the cart functions to help you get started.

Basic Overview of the Cart

The cart requires two things to run properly. The first is the cart software, which resides on our server.

The second requirement is an HTML form. The cart receives all of the information about the order and the merchant from this form. Therefore it is very important to make sure that all of your forms are coded properly. To make this task easier, we have provided an HTML Form Wizard, which will generate all the necessary code for you. This will save you many long hours of hand coding and will lessen considerably the chances of errors occurring.

Understanding what the Form Wizard does

The HTML Form Wizard generates all of the code necessary for the cart to function from your site. It will generate several types of forms, based on the parameters you provide. The Form Wizard is flexible enough to allow you to code one form for each product, or one form for several like products.

The Form Wizard does not generate HTML documents, nor will it generate forms for anything but the cart.

To follow along with the next few examples, you might want to have your web editing software opened to a page where you are going to be inserting products.

Building your first form with the Form Wizard

You will find the online html form wizard in the merchant tools section of the ezshoppingcarts.com site.

The first step once you get there will be to enter your CLIENT CODE. Click into the white box labeled CLIENT CODE. Enter your CLIENT CODE. This is so the cart knows which merchant is receiving an order.

The next step will be to set the CGI directory. Click once in the white text box labeled CGI Directory. Enter the CGI directory setting. This needs to be EXACTLY as shown, if it is not a perfect match, your forms will not be able to connect to the ezshoppingcarts.com server.

In the CGI DIRECTORY edit box enter:

https://shoppingcartsecure.com/

Next, let's enter an item. For our example, we will be selling widgets.

In the item box, enter the name of your product. Be sure of your spelling, punctuation, etc., as this is what the customer will see displayed on your page.

The quantity field is what will be shown by default on your web pages when the form is generated, if you wish it to be blank, remove the number 1 in the Qty field.

Hide Quantity: Use this to specify that the QUANTITY should be hidden from the customer. You must first specify a value in the QTY field, and then check the box HIDE QUANTITY. This will make the Quantity field hidden from the customer, so that they may not enter a specific quantity. This is useful for items that may only be ordered in a specific amount, for example, a downloadable item, would only require a QTY of 1, since it is doubtful a customer would want to order downloading rights more than once per session.

Next enter the price of your item, DO NOT use any currency symbols in this field. Enter only the dollar and cents (or equivalent) in this field.

Since most of you are using U.S. dollars as your currency, leave the currency symbol as is.

This is all we need to generate a very basic form. Click the view code button at the bottom of the page.

Now you will see the code generated by the Form Wizard. Select the code, copy it and take it into your website. When you get it to where you want it in your site go ahead and paste the code. (You may want to copy to clipboard so that you have it for future reference.)

Note that the standard Windows clipboard can only hold ONE item at a time, so after entering your first product, you will want to paste that code into your HTML document before proceeding to the next item.

Alternately, if your HTML editing software uses a lot of memory, you can open a NOTEPAD plain text document, and paste each product generated into this single document, then when all of the products have been entered, you can cut and paste from this.

At this point, you have two options, you can go ahead and exit from the online form wizard. Or you can leave the form wizard open and keep creating code for more products.

OPTIONAL FIELDS

Now let's figure out what all of these OPTIONAL fields are for. On the first screen, you have 6 optional fields. You can use any of them, or none at all.

Here is a brief explanation of each of the fields:

Part No: This is where you would enter a part or SKU number for a product. Alpha-numeric characters are acceptable to use here, as is a dash ( - ). Using other characters may result in strange behaviors, and it is not suggested that you use them.

Weight: The weight of the item. If you are shipping by weight, or using the UPS tables for shipping, this field MUST be filled in. Only decimal figures are accepted. For example 1 1/2 pounds would be entered 1.5, 2 3/4 pounds as 2.75 etc.

Shipping: If you are going to build the cost of shipping into each item, use this field to specify a specific price for this item to be shipped. Note that if you specify a specific price for shipping, you cannot use by weight or UPS shipping tables.

Frame Target: If your site uses a frameset, you must enter the target frame here. When a customer clicks to add an item to the cart, they are taken to a page generated by the server, showing them that the item was added. You need to tell the server which frame to display this page in. Use whatever name you have called this section of your frame set, such as top, bottom, left, right, or main.

Link to URL: This parameter is used if you wish a customer to be able to go back and view an item after it has been added to the cart. The parameter creates a link in the cart back to the page you specify. It works especially well for items that have their own dedicated pages. You must specify the complete path to the page you want to link.

For example: http://www.mysite.com/mypage.html

Add Item Text: This changes the default text on the Submit button within the form. By default, the button will read "Add to Shopping Cart". But you may want it to say something such as BUY NOW!

Add Item Image: Use this parameter if you wish to use an image button rather than a standard form button. You must specify the full path to the image. For example, if your image button resides in an images folder on your server, the full path would be something very similar to:

http://www.mysite.com/images/myimagebutton.gif

OTHER TABS

View Shopping Cart Tab

Here you have the option of setting the button to view the contents of a cart by either a standard form button, or an image button. There are several fields on this screen, many of which will be the same information you used on the first screen. The CLIENT CODE field should be your phone number without the dashes and with no spaces, the CGI Directory field should read exactly as follows:

https://shoppingcartsecure.com/

The default setting is to use a standard form button, with the text "View Shopping Cart". If you wish to use a standard form button, but want to change the text on the button, enter the new text in the field labeled View Item Text. Make sure the radio button selection POST method is checked. Then click VIEW CODE, this will generate the necessary code, once it has been generated, you may copy it to clipboard or copy it to notepad or directly into your html document.

To use an image button, you must change the radio selection to "Get Method", and specify the full path to your image. For example: http://www.mysite.com/images/myimagebutton.gif. After filling in the necessary fields, click VIEW CODE to have the code generated, then you may copy it to clipboard or copy it to notepad or directly into your html document.

Frame Target: This is used in the same manner as ADD TO SHOPPING BASKET, enter the name of the frameset section you want the generated page loaded into.

EMPTY CART TAB

The EMPTY CART TAB serves the same basic function as the VIEW CART TAB, the difference being that the cart is emptied rather than viewed. To change the text from the default, to use an image button, or to target a frameset, the same procedure is followed as for VIEW SHOPPING CART.

HELPFUL HINT: If you are going to make all of the VIEW SHOPPING CART and/or EMPTY SHOPPING CART buttons on your site identical, you may want to open NOTEPAD, and paste the code to a text document, that you can reuse. This will save a lot of time later down the road in entering the same information into the Form Wizard over and over.

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