Quick Start-Opening Your First Shop

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Step 1:
Create a Shop in your Mall Administrator

In order to use your shopping system you must first create a shop in your Mall Administrator. Remember Goldpaint is not just a shop but a complete mall shopping system. You can create as many separate shops as you wish. Your Mall administrator is used to create new shops, configure shipping, taxes, payments etc.Follow the link from the Examples Shop to the Shop & Mall Administration. Identify yourself by entering your email address and password. The first time you go into your mall admin and indicate the email address and password, this person is considered the owner of the system. Next click on Open New Shop under Procedures for mall owners. you will be asked to fill in the directory name in which you wish to build the new shop. This will be the name of your shop and also the directory name is your webroot. Fill in the email address of the shop owner and click continue. The email address of the shop owner can be anything you wish. If the owner of the shop is different than the owner of the system Goldpaint will only allow that person access to the shop and not the entire system. Goldpaint will automatically build all directories and files necessary for a functioning shop. It is not necessary to complete the configuration of the new shop, all necessary directories and files have been built when you see the Successful Build of Shop screen. Even a sample front door (first page) will be built. Test this by accessing this page in your browser:

Example of accessing a new shop:

http://DOMAIN/CGI-BIN/TAME-BINARY/SHOP-DIRECTORY/index.tam

Once you have created a new shop you are ready to begin to build your catalog pages and upload them
to your shop. Your new shop will appear in your webroot under the name you indicated in your Mall
administrator.

Finding your Examples Shop:

Example: Url for Unix:    http://www.goldpaint.com/cgi-bin/tame/examples/index.tam
Example: Using Nt:        http://www.goldpaint.com/cgi-shl/tame.exe/examples/index.tam

If you have purchased a single shop and not a mall, then your webmaster will have completed this step for you.

Step 2:
Build the Product File

Goldpaint uses a product file to list all products in your shop. This file is used to access products on your webpages. The product file is a simple text file with individual fields separated by a space. We call this a "space delimited flat file". To setup your product file go to your shop and bring off the "product.tdb" file via ftp. When you created your shop the system placed a blank product file in your shop.Use any text or html editor to edit your product file. All that is necessary is the first three fields; item, price, descrip. With these three fields you can successfully built product pages that work with your system. There are other default fields in your product file that will be explain later.

The first field in your product file is the item field. This is generally the item number or name of your product.

The second field is the price field. Obviously this is the price of the item you are selling. It is not necessary to include the $ sign in your database.

The third field is the descrip field. This field is used to descrip the product you are selling in a few words. This description field will be included in your shopping cart and invoice. If you need a long description of your product you might want to add an additional field. Think of the descrip field as the title of your product.

After you have created your product database you are ready to use this information to create catalog pages. In your catalog pages all you need to indicate is the item number or name field and Goldpaint will automatically bring up the other two fields.

The product.tdb text file must contains a minimum of three columns:

item
price
description (named descrip)

Each column is separated by one or more spaces. Columns which contain embedded spaces, like description, must be enclosed with square brackets.

Here is an example of a product with an item code of "book1", a price of $5.95, which is described as
"The Greatest Story Ever Told"

book1 5.95 [The Greatest Story Ever Told]

See Product Database Format for additional options available for the product file.

Step 3:
Put some Buy Buttons on an HTML page

There many examples of how to use buy buttons in your examples shop. The main concept here is you use your product file to draw on in your buy buttons. Your system comes with many options such as graphic buy buttons, text buy buttons and push-in style buy buttons. The possibilities are endless.

Tamicons:
Goldpaint comes with a started set of graphic buy buttons that you can change to any style you choose. The default directory for this buy buttons is "TAMICONS". Simply replace your custom graphics with ours using the same file name and in the TAMICONS directory and the system will use your custom buttons.


Tamepages:
Goldpaint uses a different file format for catalog pages. Instead of using the normal ".htm or .html" we use ".tam". This helps Goldpaint tract the customer through your website. If you have html pages already finished simply change the extension from (.html) to (.tam) and include these pages in your shop directory.


Push-in Form Buttons:
To use the standard push-in style buttons on the web use the format found in our examples shop for these types of buttons. We call these buttons form buttons since the buy button must be surrounded by a form statement.


To place a buy button for the book1 in your product file:

<tame ^buy: book1>

*notice all you have indicated is the item field in your product file.

See Buy Buttons & Buy Forms for additional variations.

Download Templates

Step 5:
Configure Shop in Shop Administrator

Once you have completed the above you are ready to do some configurations on your system. This is done of course in your Mall Administrator using your favorite we browser. Once you have identified yourself and have entered the mall administrator click on "edit shop configurations". This is where you will decide on shipping methods, tax rates, invoice numbers, payment methods, page footers and headers etc.You can change these settings anytime you like, so don't worry if you make a mistake here or something changes. You can make changes while your system is online. You can even close you entire shop for maintenance by simply checking a box in you shop configurations.For more on the mall administrator and configuring your mall or shop see The Mall Administrator.