Integrating cart into existing website

[RonB]

I am about to purchase ShopSite Pro for my wife's existing website, justjessyhandbags.com Can anyone share their experience integrating into an existing site? Tips and/or tricks would be appreciated. Thanks!
RonB

[Jim]

There are two methods you could use to integrate ShopSite with your wife's web site.
1. Use Order AnyWhere links to replace the existing PayPal add to cart buttons. In this way your existing (modified) web pages would be used and just the shopping cart functionality of ShopSite would be used.

2. Create a custom template to match the current look of your site and use ShopSite to generate the store pages as well as be the shopping cart.


Method one would probably take less time initially because it is simply a matter of entering your product information (i.e. name, price, sku) into ShopSite, generating the Order Anywhere links and replacing the html for the PayPal form with the ShopSite generated html
For example the site currently has (probably incorrectly since I copied it from the Black Cheerleader Purse w/Gold Lettering not Black Lettering)
<form target="paypal" action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">
<div align="right">
<input src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/x-click-but22.gif" name="submit" alt="Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure!" border="0" type="image">
<input name="add" value="1" type="hidden">
<input name="cmd" value="_cart" type="hidden">
<input name="business" value="ronandmisty@insightbb.com" type="hidden">
<input name="item_name" value="Black Cheerleader Purse w/Black Lettering" type="hidden">
<input name="amount" value="25.00" type="hidden">
<input name="no_note" value="1" type="hidden">
<input name="currency_code" value="USD" type="hidden">
<input name="bn" value="PP-ShopCartBF" type="hidden">
</div>
</form>

The ShopSite code to replace this would be something like.
<a href="http://justjessyhandbags.com/cgi-bin/sc/order.cgi?storeid=*0ed8b419116d320c90&dbname=products&itemnum=30&function=add"><img src="http://justjessyhandbags.com/media/add_to_cart.gif" alt="add_to_cart.gif" width="83" height="20" hspace="3" vspace="3" border="0" ></a>

You would need to manually edit each html page in your store and replace all of the add to carts for your products with the ShopSite code. It looks like you have about 60 products so that shouldn't take too long. The disadvantage of this method is that you have to modify your html pages manually each time you make a change. So if you make changes frequently that could be come a problem.

With method two there is more work initially but making changes to products in the store or the look of pages and updating the store is much simpler. You would need to enter more information into ShopSite about your products such as description, images associated with the product, what page the products are on. You would also need to enter information for your pages such as page name, what pages they link to etc. That part is really quite simple and could be done with a data upload if your have your date in a spreadsheet or database that can export a tab delimited file.
Creating a custom template that looks and acts pretty much like your current store does would be possible. Your design is fairly straight forward so someone familiar with ShopSite templates would be able to do to it fairly easily. If you want to do the work yourself there is a learning curve to understand the template language but once you get the hang of how things work it shouldn't be too hard. ShopSite template are simply html pages that have special tags in the form [-- -.yyyyy --] where - represents a database and yyyyy represents a field in that database. For example to put the page name in the html you would simply put the tag [-- PAGE.Name --] Then when ShopSite generates the page it will look at whatever page it is working on and put that page's name into the html being generated.

There are some template examples in the online ShopSite help. See
http://www.shopsite.com/help/8.1/en-US/ ... oduct.html and
http://www.shopsite.com/help/8.1/en-US/ ... .page.html

Currently you are using PayPal so the shopper is directed to their site for finalizing the order. With ShopSite they would be directed to your store's own shopping cart. The shopping cart can be configured, using a separate template, to look like your store pages if you want or you could use the default shopping cart template which is basic but functional.

ShopSite Pro has lots of features such as Gift Certificate, Tell A Friend, Rewards, Customer Registration etc that you can utilize to help your business be more successful.