international shipping and product price help

[prettybird138]

Hi, I am new to using shopsite and new to creating an online website. I am using ipage and the weebly drag and drop site editor premium. I am trying to add products to sell to the website so I am using shopsite to add the shopping cart to my site. I have added a couple products so far and tested the ordering process. I would like to be able to charge one flat shipping rate for orders within the US and another flat rate for international orders. But so far I only have one rate showing up for everything. So how do I set it up so different locations will be charged a different flat rate amount?

Also, another question I have is: to add products to my website I have been using weebly to add a picture and a description and then I'm using shopsite to add the purchase buttons. The products have choices of colors and sizes and the price will change according to the size. When I go into shopsite and click on order anywhere to copy the html code, and paste it into weebly, it brings up the color and size choices, but the price does not show up. So the customer wouldn't see the price until they view the shopping cart. Is there a way to have the price show up on the product page and change as the customer chooses their size option so they can see how much it will cost. Also, I want the price to show so when I put products on sale, the customer will be able to see the sale price.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

[Jim]

You can define different shipping rates for multiple locations using the ShopSite shipping options but all rates will show in the cart. You could use some javascript and styles to determine the country the product is being shipped to only allow them to checkout if the shipping method for that country is selected. There have been other posts in the forum about how to do this recently so you might try a search of the forum and see if you can see the method they used.
Using real-time rate calculation from UPS, USPS, FedEx will limit the shipping options to those that are available to the destination country.

To display the price for order options you need to include the text in the order option definition for example
If you have a base price for a T-shirt of 7.00 with small being the base, medium adding a $ and large adding $2 you would have
Small $7.00;
Medium $8.00;+1
Large $9.00;+2

The text in front of the ";" will display in the pulldown menu. The value after the ";" will be added to the base price.
This works fine if you always maintain the same price difference between the various sizes and adjust the base price when there is a pricing change. But if you will be changing the price difference between sizes it will require all the options be edited when a price is changed.

[prettybird138]

Hi, thanks for the reply. I understand I can have the drop down list calculate the price by adding an amount after the ;, but is there a way for the price to show up on the product page? Right now, the only way the price shows up is for me to type the price in the description part. Can it automatically show up so that when the customer chooses one size or the other, the price will show the right amount, or will the price only show up when they are looking at the shopping cart?

Thanks!

[Jim]

The shipping charges will only be shown in the shopping cart, there is no way to get them to show on store pages.

[prettybird138]

Sorry, I didn't mean the shipping charges, I mean the product price.

[Jim]

Oh, I guess you mean you are using the Order Anywhere feature to put the Add to Cart links on your pages.

The Order Anywhere functionality only creates the links to add the product to the cart, all other information needs to be supplied on the page through your html. That includes price, images, text etc.

Order Anywhere is nice if you have just a few products and pages and don't make many changes. However there is a definite advantage of using ShopSite to generate your store pages instead of manually creating each one. With ShopSite creating the pages any changes you make to a page or product will be in affect the next time you publish your store. You don't have to edit individual pages to make price changes or add or remove products. You do that either in the backoffice of ShopSite or in a spreadsheet and then upload the data to ShopSite and publish and it is done.

[prettybird138]

So what's the best way for me to create my store. I am going to have a lot of products and they will each have 2 or 3 drop down boxes for color choices and size choices. The color choice list will be the same for most items except some items will have 2 color choice drop down boxes, but most will only have one color choice drop down box. So far I have been adding the picture and item description in weebly and then using the Order Anywhere feature to add the add to cart links. Is there a better way? I am very new to this so I really appreciate your help! I haven't seen how I get the the back office on shopsite yet, how do I get to that? And then how do I get the information I add to shopsite onto the weebly page editor? Can I completely create everything on shopsite and then transfer it to weebly or do I even need weebly? Thanks!

[Jim]

The best way to create your store is what works best for you. The Order Anywhere method that you are currently using makes it easy to add products to an already existing website. However, as you add more products to the store, need to make changes to prices, or decide you want to change the entire look of your store it can be a time consuming process. By using ShopSite to create your store pages you greatly reduce the need to hand code pages one at a time. And when ShopSite generates your pages you don't need to use a tool like Weebly since ShopSite handles that for you.

In either case (Order Anywhere and ShopSite generated pages) you need to you need to add certain information about your products to the ShopSite merchant interface (back office). Both will need product price, sku, name and possibly ordering options. ShopSite generated product pages also need other information about the product that you currently add to your weebly created pages, images, description, and more detailed information that you would have on a "more information" page, All of that information can be added to the product information in ShopSite.

When you have ShopSite generate your pages you need to enter the information that is not product specific on your current pages into ShopSite. The page information can be for pages which display your products, About Us pages, policy pages, general store information, etc. The information for each type of page can be added to the ShopSite back office in the Pages section of the backoffice.

Once you have the page and product information in ShopSite you can choose from one of the ShopSite provided themes (40 are provided with multiple color schemes for each) or you can create your own templates. A theme gives you the advantage of being able to automatically coordinate the look of all your store pages, including information pages, product pages, shipping cart, gift certificates, customer registration etc by clicking a couple of buttons and publishing your store. So in a matter of a couple of minutes you could completely change your store looks for a seasonal look, a special sale or to update your corporate image.

Custom templates allow you to do the same things as the themes do but you need to create the templates for each of the types of pages that you use in your store. This can take some time to complete but once it is done you don't have to be constantly modifying pages when prices are changed or new products are added or deleted. You simply make the change in the ShopSite back office or an upload file for price changes , product additons etc and click the Publish tab and your sore is updated with the changes you made.

You might want to checkout some of the video tutorials on our website at http://www.shopsite.com/tutorial.

Hope that answers your questions.

[prettybird138]

Thank you for your input! It sounds like I should use shopsite then and not weebly. I like the sounds of how shopsite will work better. So, previously I tried setting up my store in shopsite and clicked publish and then when I view my store, the picture that I added for a product was really huge. When I looked at the store I could only see a small corner of the picture because it was so huge. So how can I make the picture a normal size for my products? Also, when I go online to my website address, it goes to my store I created with weebly. How do I switch it so that the store I create through shopsite will be online? I called ipage before and asked them about that and one person switched it to the shopsite store but couldn't get it to work right and someone else over there just switched it back to the weebly store so I thought I had to use weebly to set everything up, but it sounds like I don't have to.

thanks for your help! I really appreciate it!

[prettybird138]

I didn't get an answer to my last post. Just wondering if anyone can help me? thanks