Buy Buttons

We currently have shopping cart software that allows us to have completely static pages. It gives us the ability in FrontPage to add snippets of ASP code. The up-side is that we have total control over every page. The down-side is that each page must be individually built in FrontPage. These snippets of code allow us to access the database values for options, price and other database items from the static pages. The problem is that this code is poorly supported and has no shipping support. We would like to replace it with ProductCart.

We understand that if a site has thousands of products, it would not be practical to build each page individually and a dynamically generated page is the way to go. However, we have a few hundred products and that is within a practical range.

There are “Buy Now” buttons in ProductCart, but as we understand this only takes you to a dynamic page in order to order the product. This is fine if you have a few products, but would be a problem with hundreds of products. It would be hard to keep the information on the static pages coordinated with the information in the database. We are looking for a better solution.

The optimal solution for us is to add a tool bar to Dreamweaver CS3 that would add snippets of ASP code to the page to enable us to build what is now a dynamically generated page by ProductCart. We would then have total control over the styling of the now completely static pages. We would use a mostly standard header and footer with a mini shopping cart in the header. We would also use the standard ordering pages and back-end processing.

Does anyone have any ideas?

I cannot answer your CS3 toolbar question specifically but I have a handful of sites with limited products where the product pages are all hand-coded and do not rely upon the dynamic product category or detail pages.

www.opakallc.com and www.bumperblocker.com are two such examples.

The requirements for adding a product to a page are simply a HTML form with the correct values, and being pointed at the instprd.asp page which performs the "add to cart" process.  An examination of the products in the above sites should reveal a few combinations of product configurations and how those configurations impact the HTML form.

On the Opaka site you will note that there are products with attributes that appear in a dropdown.  There is custom ASP scripting that permits the dynamic retrieval of such values.  Both sites also dynamically retrieve the prices which also, of course, required ASP scripting.

So your toolbar snippets would likely need to include:

• the ability to add an "add to cart" form
• a call to a function to retrieve product table entries such as price, image path, product description, product options, etc.
• other functions as needed ???
  

Does this help address your question?

I'm going to agree with Hamish on his concerns about the static pages.  You apparently feel that the threshold is a few hundred products, but after seeing clients come to me to rebuild sites in dynamic form because of such a choice, my personal threshold is a couple dozen products - or more likely a few products. 

I think that static pages for hundreds of products is simply madness and would strongly discourage such a decision.  But if the decision is made and you plan to proceed, then my above post begins to address what you will need in order to implement that strategy. 

We used to have static pages with codes over 5 years ago.  It was working fine and we were listed well in search engines.  Plus we had only a few hundred items.  Then our provider of the codes discontinued it.  So we had to look for another ecommerce solution.  I was searching for days and cut it down to two products.  Product cart was one of them.  Each one of them had something to offer the other one did not have.  We decided to go with productcart, and the lower cost (1/4 of the other one) was the big decission maker for us.   We are not big and cannot spend thousand of dollars.  Back then one of the downside of product cart was that they were not so search engine friendly due to their dynamic database pages.  Ironically within 1/2 year they came up with the first solution, and they have improved it since.  I hope that is not your reason for wanting to use static pages.  As you can see you don't need it.  One of the biggest improovements was the google feed.  We now find our products all the time near the top (if not the top) listing when searching for them.   I'm glad we switched to productcart, since we have expanded massively since.  We now have to manage thousands of products, and I can't imagine to create pages for each of them and plugging in some code.  I'm glad that is over with.  Another nice feature is that you can create your navigation on the fly.  You do not have to upload entire sections because of a change.  For example we have a seasonal category, and we sometimes move the Easter or Christmas section to the top navigation depending on what sales season we are in.  Would have never done this with static pages.  Now I did get the ebay add on, and that will make it easy for us to list them there too.  It's better then the turbo lister from ebay, or the ebay online listing interface.  Ebay is a teaser for new customers to find us and to use our sites as well.

Katharina