Temporarily closing store

[Paula]

Is there a way to close down the shopping cart part/checkout page temporarily, while I work on the site? I don't want people to get confused and accidentally order something, as I haven't even set up my payment portion yet. Still working on design and layout. Thanks.

[Jim]

There is not an easy way to temporarily close a store.

You could remove the order.cgi from the shopping cart cgi directory (normally called /sc or /bo) which would prevent any one from ordering but that would require that you have easy access to that directory which you may or may not have.

[Paula]

Thanks, Jim. I will leave as is. But what do other stores do when they need to close temporarily for maintenance? I've seen other stores have a sign on the homepage that says "Closed for Maintenance" or something similar.

[Jim]

They usually just replace their main index.html page content with the message that they want the shopper to see. If you make sure there isn't a search form or links to other pages on the site on that page then they probably can't get to pages where they could add an item to the cart.