• This Document.
• Operational Outline.
• Package Outline.
• Skills required
• Getting started
• Client Information
• Order Enquiries and Status Updates
• Stock Control
• Product Information
• Entering Product Data.
• Amending Products
• Generating Buy Buttons.
• Product Categories
• Sending Email to your Clients
• Setting Shipping Charges
• Reports
• Resellers, Portals and Affiliates.
• Customising your site
• Trade Pricing
• Hiding Our URL Address

This document details the facilities on offer in our ecommerce package. The document has many links to other pages as examples or where the tasks mentioned can be actioned. To make best use of these links it is best to have set up your own store. If you haven't done this you can always try logging in using
Login: guest
Password: guest

Operational Outline.

The following is a brief outline of how to set up and use the ecommerce package and how a client would use it.

• You register with us and add some products to our database.
• You cut and paste some 'Buy Buttons' to your web site or just use the catalogue address we provide you.
• You FTP your amended site to your host provider if you have your own site.
• A visitor clicks on a 'Buy Button' and adds item to his cart.
• We display his shopping cart in the appropriate currency, with tax calculations and delivery charges.
• The buyer checks out and makes payment using our secure server.
• We send the buyer a confirmation and send the order to you.
• You login to our secure server to access the credit card details.

Our ecommerce package was designed to allow you to fit ecommerce to an existing web site. It also provides a catalogue system to allow building of basic sites providing a quick and easy way to put a no frills shop online and start taking orders.

The product is ideally suited for

• Designers looking to enable ecommerce for their clients.
• Users building their own sites.

To use the ecommerce package will require a certain knowledge of the internet. The more you know the more you can do.

• To use the product catalogue you need to be able to use a keyboard and browser. Nothing more. You will be provided with an address to the catalogue which you can use as your web address. This is an easy starting point if you are new to the internet or just want to experiment.
• If you have your own web site and want to add 'Buy buttons' to it you need some more advanced skills. You or your site designer will need to understand what a 'link' or 'form' is in HTML terminology and be able to 'cut and paste' from our application to your web pages.
• More advanced users can place the cart in frames, pass extra information to the cart via forms and alter the look and feel of the cart.

It is not difficult and support is only a call or email away.

In some rare cases you might have built your site using a package which doesn't allow you to change the HTML code. In that case you won't be able to use our package.

Getting started

You can quickly set up a basic ecommerce site for trial. This will allow you to set up a few products with basic data and sample shipping charges to get a quick feel of how the system works. You can amend this later to use some of the more advanced features described in this document. Unlike some sites you will not be asked for payment details in advance. Click here if you want to try it now

Try a sample site as a guest

Client Information

The following information defines the various items that you need to enter to set up your store. Not all fields are necessary and many can be added or amended after tou are up and running.

• Your reference code. Up to 12 alphanumeric characters.
  Choose a code which will be used to identify your store. This will be used when you login to make any changes or when the shopping cart or catalogue is called. E.G. If you are the Acme Nut and Raisin store then acmenut might make a sensible code.
• Password. This will be used when you login to access your orders or add or amend products. It needs to be at least 4 characters long and cannot be the same as your reference code.
• Your email address. When any orders are placed this is where the orders are sent to.
• Enter Your Store or Company Name. This will be displayed at the top of the shopping cart and checkout forms. If required the top of the forms can be customised to show a more comprehensive banner from your site.
• Currency. You can select any currency from our table as your base currency. The shopping cart will also be displayed in the currency of the buyer's domain. The currencies are updated daily and the conversion is at the market rate.
• Tax Included. Are your Prices inclusive of Tax. If not then we will calculate the tax for you.
• Tax rate if applicable. Only needed if we are to calculate the tax.
• Website Address (Optional). This is used when an order is placed to allow the buyer to link back to your site.
• Telephone Number. Your telephone number in case we need to call you.
• Fax Number. Fax number to where any orders are to be sent by buyers not wishing to use the internet.
• Credit Cards Taken if Any. The buyer will only be allowed to place an order with the credit cards you select from the list that you select.
• Internet Merchant Account. It will become more common to collect payments directly into your account in the future. If you want to do this you need to sign up for an 'Internet Merchant Account' with a provider such as worldpay. It is easier to be authorised if you already have a normal merchant account.
  If you do not have one and have a normal merchant account then we would recommend processing orders through your PDQ system as you normally would to begin with. You can always switch to an online merchant account at a later date.
  We currently link directly to worldpay.
• Merchant Code. This is only needed if you use an internet merchant account as in the step above.
• Your Address. Only displayed where the buyer wants to post his order.
• Trade Pricing. Set this to use our trade pricing module. This is for business to business users and is not part of our standard product.
• Return to Shopping Page.. This message is normally displayed in the shopping cart pages. You can set this flag to turn the display off. This is useful if you display the shopping cart in a frame or in a separate pop up window.
• Allow product to be ordered more than once. The default is to only allow one line of any particular product on an order with any second or subsequent addition to the shopping cart replacing the original quantity. Turn this flag on and any item can be ordered more than once on an order. Useful if you have a product code that comes in different sizes, colurs etc.
• Display 'Secure Certficate Logo'. If set the logo will be displayed at the top of the payment pages to help reassure potential buyers. If using frames then this is useful as the normal security messages are not displayed when the secure page is called within a frame. The secure messages displayed by the browser only apply to the main URL address alyhough the secure transfer is in effect.
• Stock PolicySelection of a company wide stock control policy can be set and can be overridden on a product item basis allowing easy control for the site controller. See the Stock Control section for more information.

There is a comprehensive selction of options to help you select orders for display or updating. You can use this to easily email your clients rather than save their emails off line in your own PC or system.

There is an order status field that can be used to record the progress of an order. The buyer has his order number recorded and by clicking on a link on your site he will be shown the current status of his order and when this was last updated. Any changes can be sent to the client keeping them fully informed of their order. This facility is optional.

Stock Control Policy

You can set the default to accept all orders, accept where stock level is zero but warn the customer, or only accept orders while stock lasts.

The company policy can be overridden on a product item basis allowing easy control for the site administrator. Click here to set your company wide stock policy.

The choices avaiable are

• Accept all orders. No stock levels maintained.
• Warn the client in an out of stock situation but allow his order to be taken.
• Reject orders when out of stock. Useful for end of stock lines.

Each individual product can have a different policy, the default policy being that of the company.

You can set a warning message at product level to be displayed when stock levels reach zero to help the customer with his decisions.

Stock levels can be updated by one of the following.

1. Amending single product stock levels.Click here to activate.
2. Uploading a file of stock levels.Click here to activate.
3. Sending an email containing stock levels. Click here to activate.
4. Using ftp to send a file containing stock levels. Click here to activate.

The following gives an outline of the various flags and information required for each product. Most of the information is optional and can be added at any time. There is no need to worry about getting it right first time.

• Product Code. A unique code to identify the product. This can be up to 16 characters and is restricted to letters, numbers and -(hyphen) and _ (underscore).
• Short Description. One line brief description of the product (40 characters).
• Price. Price of the product in your currency. This will be displayed in your currency and the currency of the visitor if we can determine this from his address. E.G. If the vistor logs in from isp.domain.au then the price will display in Australian Dollars as well as the base currency.

• Price Override. For some products you might want to override the price held on our database. Perhaps when making a special offer or offering the the same product at a different price via a different web page. If you set this flag then when you call the shopping cart the price passed from your page will be used.
• Weight. Used to calculate shipping charges if you charge by weight.
• Category. Used to help manage the product catalogue.
• Tax. Whether the product is taxed or not. (Default is standard tax as held on your site record).
• Long Description. You can add a full description of the product including HTML code. This description (and any images) will be available within the catalogue or can be accessed from the shopping cart.
• Product Variations. You might offer the same product in a different range of colours, sizes finishes etc.. If that is the case then you will probably want dropdown selection boxes for your page to allow your customer to make a selection. This can be done by either coding a dropdown box on your own site or adding the information to our site. If you add the information to our site then we will generate the code for you to cut and paste to your site and it will also appear in your catalogue.
• Product Images. 2 images can be uploaded for each product. They will appear along with any long product description. A thumbnail image will also be displayed in the catalogue to identify those products with images.

You can offer different prices based on quantities. When the shopping cart is called the correct price will be used based on the quantity required.

Entering Product Data.

There are several ways of adding product data. Products can be entered:-

• On setting up your site.
  Up to 5 products can be entered when setting up your site for the first time. Only some basic information is requested to get you started quickly.
• One at a time.
  A single form per product allows comprehensive product details to be entered. This needs to be used for entering some of the optional product information.
• In bulk.
  A form allows basic data for up to 100 products to be entered at the one time. This can be saved and filled up offline before connecting to the site for processing thus freeing up telephone lines if necessary.
• By upload.
  A file of tab separated values can be uploaded to the site for processing. This is useful where you have the product data in a database or spreadsheet. Most of these applications allow you to export a tsv (tab separated) file which makes for easy updating and maintenance of your products.

When amending products you will be given a form to help you select the products to amend. You can enter the product code if you know it or you can use wild cards (e.g. %NUT% finds all products with NUT in the description) or select products by category. A list of the products selected will be shown for you amend in bulk. To enter a single product in more detail you can click on the product code when a separate form will be displayed with all of the product options.

Generating Buy Buttons.

You have set up your site, added your products and now you want to let your customers buy something. There are two ways to do this.

1. The simplest way is to have a single link on your site to our catalogue. This will then display a category list (if applicable) of your products priced in the appropriate currency. The link is of the form:-
   <A HREF="/ecommerce/ecart/clist.htm/your_store_code">Catalogue</A>.
   Click here for an example
   
2. The more common approach if you have your own site is to place a 'Buy button' alongside the products you wish to sell. To do this you need to put some additional HTML code on your page to be passed to our shopping cart when your customer clicks the Buy Button. We will generate the code for you to cut and paste onto your site but a detailed explanation of the process will help in understading the proces..
   
   When the shopping cart is called the cart needs to know your store code, the product and the quantity wanted. This can be passed in several ways either by use of a form or a simple link.
   The link on your page that calls the cart must contain the following fields.
   • store - Your store code
   • prod - The product code
   • qty - The quantity required
   • detail - The name of the Add button.
     and optionally
   • price - The product price. (Only if the product price_override flag is set)
   
   A simple link can be used where the buyer is not required to enter anything.
   E.G. The following code will allow one of product TSE1 of store test to be bought. The customer can change the quantity within the shopping cart.
   <A HREF="/ecommerce/ecart/add.htm?store=test&prod=TSE1&qty=1>Buy</A>
   
   If you want the customer to be able to enter the quantity and any other data then a form needs to be used The following example has put a small form within a table and allows the customer to enter the quantity required and then click on the image to place the item in the shopping cart.
   The code for this is:-
   

   	<TABLE BORDER=1><TR><TD>
   	<FORM METHOD=POST ACTION="/ecommerce/ecart/add.htm">
   	<INPUT TYPE=hidden NAME=prod VALUE=TSE1>
   	<INPUT TYPE=hidden NAME=store VALUE=test>
   	<INPUT TYPE=TEXT NAME=qty SIZE=4 VALUE="1">
   	<INPUT TYPE=image NAME=detail BORDER=0 SRC="/ecommerce/buy.gif" ALT="Add to Cart" VALUE="Add">
   	</FORM></TD></TR></TABLE>
   

   We generate the HTML code for you bu if you understand the principle of the form then you can easily add the code to your site and make enhancements as below.
   • Note that the HTML code is almost the same for every product. Only the product code changes.
   • You can replace the 'Buy Button' by one of your own design. Just change the code to point to your link.
   • You can add extra information about the products to appear on the order. Any data entered or selected within the form will be picked up by the shopping cart. The NAME and VALUE fields of every extar field on the form will appear on each order line. If you add the following code to the form then the customer can pick a colour which will then appear in the order line for that product.
     Green Red Blue
     The code for the above is:

     	<SELECT NAME="colour">
     	<OPTION VALUE="Green">Green
     	<OPTION VALUE="Red">Red
     	<OPTION VALUE="Blue">Blue
     	</SELECT>
     

If using our catalogue and you have a lot of products then you might want to breakdown these by category to make for more manageable displays.You can add as many categories as you like and allocate products to these. You catalogue list will then show a list of categories with the number of items in each.

Sending Email to your Clients

You can send an email to clients who have either bought from your store or registered with your store. You select the clients you want to send emails to, compose the email and we will send the email to all those clients. Useful for notifying special offers or general news to all visitors who have registered an interest in your store.

Setting Shipping Charges

You can enter a mixed selection of shipping charges with different charge methods for different areas of the world.

You can set rates for

• Your own country.
• Western Europe
• North America
• Eastern Europe
• Pacific Rim (Far East)
• Rest of the world.

For example to show some of the possible options let's say you are based in the United Kingdom. You could:-

• Set the shipping as included in the price for UK customers.
• Set the charge for a fixed amount to be added for Western Europe.
• Set the charge based on order weight for the Pacific Rim.
  For example
  • 10 UK pounds up to 5 kilos.
  • 15 UK pounds between 5 and 10 kilos.
  • 20 UK pounds over 10 kilos.
• Set the charge to reduce with increasing order value in N.America. (e.g 5 pounds up to order value of 20, 2 pounds up to 50 pounds, then free for orders over 50 pounds.)
  For example
  • 10 UK pounds up to an order value of 20 pounds.
  • 2 UK pounds between 20 and 50 pounds.
  • Free Delivery over 10 pounds.
• State that the charge will be notified by email to the customer everywhere else in the world.

We provide reports to help you check the activity in your cart and to look at your order history.

• Order Analysis.
  This shows the activity in your shopping basket. Each line of the report shows 4 sets of figures. These are in pairs showing the number of product lines/and the total quantity placed in the basket.
  This should help to gauge which products are generating interest.
• Order Summary.
  This shows full details of all the orders placed on your store.
• Order Payments.
  This shows credit card information details of all the orders placed on your store. These are accessed via a secure server with a pasword protected login and can only be accessed once.

The is an opportunity to earn from our package even if you are not using the package.

• Become a portal site. We rebrand the package to suit your companies look and feel and use a URL of your company. You can then sell the ecommerce solution as if it was your own solution. Hence if you are a design company or service provider the client remains yours.
• Become a reseller. Actively market our package and collect a sign up fee.
• Become an affiliate. Put a link to our site on yours and collect a sign up fee every time someone signs up having found us via your link. Mor information here.

When you link to the shopping cart or catalogue you will probably want the shopping cart to look different from the default set up.

Set up your own order confirmation and checkout messages.

• At the top of the payments page.
• At the foot of the payments page.
• At the top of the email order confirmation message.
• At the foot of the email order confirmation message.

Customise the look of the cart and checkout pages.

• Add a background image.
• Set a background colour.
• Define the font to be used.
• Set a background colour for tables.
• Set the colour of the links.
• Change the look of the page headers by
  • Either adding a link to a logo to appear alongside your company name
  • OR Adding your own HTML code for the header. This can include logos, banners etc. from your own site and to your own design.
  • NOTE. If you add links to images which are not on a secure server then when the buyer goes to the payment page the browser will probably give the buyer a warning depending on which browser he is using. This can lead to lost orders if the buyer is not confident. To get round this you can either:-
    • upload the images for logos or backgrounds to our secure server
    • or you can put the whole shopping cart in a frame and not have any logos or banners appearing in the cart
    • or you can put the shopping cart in a separate opup window.
    More information on how to do this is given on the 'Customising your cart' page.
• Add HTML code to customise the foot of the page.
  The same warning apply as in changing the look of page headers above.

When a visitor adds to his shopping cart he comes to our site and our URL address will appear in the Address section of his browser. You might not like this and want your own domain name only to be visible.

You can achieve this by putting the cart and catalogue in frames. One way to do this is to have a simple frame which controls all the other frames.

The example shown had the shopping cart look customised to remove the header and the site details amended to not display 'Return to Shopping' link.