Outline:
- Just a Note
- Access the Administration and Opening a Site
- Creating Your Product Database
- Letting Your Customers Make Purchases at Your Shop
- To Infinity and Beyond!
Just a Note
As Easy as 1-2-3
Getting your shopping system up and running to accept orders from customers is as easy as 1-2-3.
- Open a new shop through the administration center
- Create a product database
- Put a buy button on your page
This document walks you through the process step by step.
For your information, there is a short section on the installation below. Feel free to skip this section if your system is already installed or you are concerned that it might cause confusion. It is intending to extend your knowledge and some users may find it helpful to start at the beginning. Otherwise, go to step one!
About Installation
If you are installing the system yourself, there is detailed documentation at: Getting Started - Installing the system. This section is intended as a quick overview so that you are aware of how the system is installed.
The install steps are:
- Go to download.html.html to obtain the software to download
- Select the version for your server
- Complete the download
- Uncompress the files (If you need help see the FAQ for install)
- Start your browser and run the install using the appropriate URL provided in the getting started section above.
- As you complete the install, we suggest you print each screen so that you have all the paths and file locations available for reference.
- Once the install is complete you can visit your example shop or using the simple steps below you can open your shop and get started making sales.
Access the Administration and Opening a Site
What you will need!
- The path to your example shop.
- Your id and password, entered during the installation.
- The name you want to use for your new shop.
- Pertinent information such as the shop address, phone and email address.
What is the Administration Center?
The administration center allows you to create and manage new shops. For our purposes, you will use the administration center to build your shop, which will include a starting index.tam, product.tdb, and data directory all with default configurations.
Accessing the Administration Screens
To set up your Shopping System you will use the Administration Screens. Access to the Administration Screens is available through the example shop that is set up when your system is install. When your system is finished being installed the last screen provides access to the example shop or you can access this shop at any time using the following path:
http://yourdomain/yourcgi/cshop/examples/index.tam
where:
- yourdomain is the name you provided to get your key such as www.coolmall.com
- yourcgi is the directory where your tame program is located (this is usually call cgi-bin)
- tame is the name of your tame program (this is usually "tame" for UNIX systems and "tame.exe" for NT systems).
This information is available if you print out each page of the installation as you complete it, or have the shopping system representative who installed your system provide it to you.
Logging into the Administration Center
The Administration Center begins with an identification screen to provide security for your system. When your system was installed an id and password were provided for overall access. This information is available from the person who installed your system. Once you have entered your id and password select the submit button. You are now in the administration center. Now let get a shop open!
Opening a Shop
To open a shop
- select "utilities" from the menu bar on the left side.
- select "create new shop" from the screen that appears on the right side.
- enter a valid directory (it doesn't have to exist yet) for your type of system. That means that if your system doesn't allow spaces or special characters, then they can't be used in the new shop name.
- select a shop owner from the drop down list OR enter a new owner name and password. You should do only one!
- select the "build the shop" option at the bottom of the screen,
You will be returned to the menu bar list. Now you should select "shop info" to add the general shop information such as address and phone numbers.
You can enter as much information here as you would like to distinguish your shop, then select "apply changes". Ultimately, you will want to enter all this information, but you can do it later if you want to move on quickly.
Select the "email setup" option from the menu bar and enter a shop email. This is where orders will be sent. Make sure this is a complete address i.e., youremail@yourprovider. Then, select "apply changes" to complete the update.
Now, select the shop door option at the top of the screen.
YOU HAVE A SHOP OPEN!! Okay, it doesn't have anything in it yet, but we are half way there.
Creating Your Product Database
What you will need!
- A list of items you want to sell at your shop.
- The price and description of each item.
Your Product Database
Actually a product database has already been created for you. To start you can use this simple database to enter your products with descriptions and pricing.
To access your product database:
Select "edit product database" from your shop door page.
You are now in our database manager! The database for the current shop is open and an example item is included. You can leave this item or you can edit it and replace example with your live data. In addition, you can add records to the database.
Here are a few "dos and don'ts" and some things to help you through your data input.
- DO enter a unique item in the "item" field for each record. This is the way the database accesses items customers want to buy.
- DON'T worry if you make a mistake, you can re-edit any record.
- DO complete the first three field for every record (item, price, descrip) which are required.
As a reference here are definitions of the three required field in the product database.
item: The first column in the product database that must be a unique indicator of product.
price: The second column in the product database. This should be a numeric value without symbols such as $.
descrip: The third column in the product database where you can place pertinent information about the product to display to your customers.
- DON'T put in a currency symbol in the price. That is set in the administration, and the default is $.
- DON'T worry if you don't have information for all the fields. Right now this is a basic database. Later your can add and delete fields to make this database serve your needs EXACTLY!
With these thoughts in mind here we go!
Edit a Record
Click on the hyperlink information in the "item" column of the record that you wish to edit and the edit page will appear.
Make your changes (you can even use html codes to format the information, but you might not want to get too fancy yet). Remember you can make changes later!
Select "apply" to update the database and return to the list screen.
You have made a product database record change. It is that easy!
Add a Record
Select "add record" from the top menu bar.
Enter at least the item, price and description of the product you want to sell. Remember the item must be unique for each record.
You can enter other information into the remaining fields if you want.
Select "add record"
Enter additional records in the same method.
When you are through select "cancel" to return to the list screen.
Delete a Record
Click on the hyperlink information in the "item" column for the appropriate record and the edit page will appear.
If this is the correct record, select the "delete" option at the top of the screen.
You will be asked to verify that this is a record you want to delete. If it is select "delete"; otherwise, select "cancel" and you will be returned to the detail page for the record.
Finishing with the Product Database
When you have made all the additions and changes you want, select the "return" button at the top left of the list screen. This will return you to the shop door.
Now you have a shop front door and a product database. Now all you need is a way for your customers to buy your product and the system is complete.
I'm sure you want to add some html to make your site exciting, but that can be completed after the you see the whole system in action. So let's get on to the final step.
Letting Your Customers Make Purchases at Your Shop.
We have a shop door and a product database, both of which you can make as customized as you want a little later! But for now let's create a buy button so a purchase can be made!
You should be in the page manager with your shop door on the screen. This page is always called index.tam in case you need to find it in your shop directory.
The top part of the screen is the actual page your customer would see and the bottom (page manager) is where we will be making some changes. After each change, or anytime you wish, select the "apply" button and see how your page looks.
Using the page manager
To get our feet wet, let's change the heading at the top of the page first.
Find the text between the html <h1>...</h1> tags. You can change that text to be more appropriate for your shop. Something like:" Welcome to the most exciting new web shopping site: Your shop name".
Select "apply" and your change will appear at the top.
Okay if you are html proficient this may seem basic, but guess what. This shopping system is that easy!
Adding a Buy Button
Now let's use our first tame tag to create a buy button!
The ^buy tag creates a buy button on any tame page. Clicking on the button brings up the shopping cart.
The syntax of this button is:
<tame> ^buy: ITEM </tame>
where the ITEM is the entry in the first column of your product database. Hint: That is the column that had "example" in it!
So if we use the example item in the database the tag would read:
<tame> ^buy: example </tame>
Put this in place of the "Modify this page to be your own shop door", or if you deleted the example item use one of your items in place of the word example.
Now select "apply" and see a buy button appear. It will look like:
Wow! Your customers can buy something. Unfortunately, right now they don't know what it is they can buy or how much it costs, so let's add a little more information.
Making the Buy Button More Understandable to Your Customers
After the ^buy tag let's add the description of the item and its price from the database.
The syntax to present a field from your product database for a specific item is:
<tame>?ITEM,FIELDNAME</tame> (with no spaces!)
The item is the same as item in the buy button syntax; i.e., "example". The FIELDNAME is the name at the top of the column in the product database. The fields in the default database are price, descrip, weight, url and keywords. So to add the description of the item:
<tame>?example,descrip</tame>
This tells the system to present the information in the record "example" for the field "descrip". The same is true for the price:
<tame>?example,price</tame>
Now we will add some words to help the information make sense to your customer
<tame>?example,descrip</tame> for only <tame>?example,price</tame>
The last thing to do is add the currency! We have a special tag for that, it is:
<tame>&CU</tame>
If we add this in the entire line looks like this:
<tame> ^buy: example </tame> <tame>?example,descrip</tame> for only <tame>&CU</tame><tame>?example,price</tame>
and when you select "apply" your screen will now show:
This is an example product for only $ 2.95
You now have a fully operational shop!
To Infinity and Beyond!
So what next! Nothing except to select the buy button. The shopping system does the rest. But if you want to get fancy there are lots of things to do!
- You can add html and tame formats to your page. Use your html guide for basic html. For tame tags, the shopping system glossary of tags is available through your example shop under Online Documentation or at /examples/docshop/ to find out about tame tags.
- Use our detailed documentation for help with enhancing your database at database link, by accessing /examples/docshop/data_acc.htm.
- Use the documentation at /examples/docshop/buy_butn.htm or the example shop under buy buttons to increase your buy functionality with things like quantity and quality variables.
- The administration center has more administrative functionality to change your variables, select the types of payments you will accept, add information to all your pages using the page_end command, add shipping and tax functionality and a whole lot more.
Okay, so go
select the buy button on your new shop and see what develops!
Remember all you had to do was 1-2-3. . .
open a shop, put some records in a database and add a buy button.
We did the rest!