Customizing ProductCart

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Buy Buttons

Printed From: ProductCart E-Commerce Solutions
Category: ProductCart
Forum Name: Customizing ProductCart
Forum Description: Exchange messages with other users that are customizing ProductCart.
URL: https://forum.productcart.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=1440
Printed Date: 22-April-2025 at 9:40am
Software Version: Web Wiz Forums 12.04 - http://www.webwizforums.com

Topic: Buy Buttons

Posted By: J P Hill
Subject: Buy Buttons
Date Posted: 12-March-2008 at 11:32am

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?

Replies:

Posted By: Hamish
Date Posted: 12-March-2008 at 11:46am

Hi J P,
Can you clarify the issue with the "Buy Now" buttons, I'm not sure I understand the issue.

I would recommend NOT using static pages for either categories or products.
I think you would lose much of the flexibility of the product.
It's possible to customise the look of the site quite heavily whilst still using the supplied dynamic code.
There's lot's that can be done with a combination of CSS, Layout options, parameters, etc.
If you can't get exactly what you want it's usually a matter of tweaking the supplied dynamic code for the ASP pages to move / add / remove elements.

Posted By: Greg Dinger
Date Posted: 12-March-2008 at 11:46am

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?

-------------
GreyBeard Design Group

Certified ProductCart Developer

Web Design/Development/Hosting

http://tinyurl.com/5c8t4t" rel="nofollow - Add-Ons & Custom Code |

Posted By: Hamish
Date Posted: 12-March-2008 at 11:48am

By the way, it's possible to use any combination of the different layouts available in PC by pointing the menu entries for the products and/or categories to the different page layouts available.

Posted By: Greg Dinger
Date Posted: 12-March-2008 at 11:50am

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.

-------------
GreyBeard Design Group

Certified ProductCart Developer

Web Design/Development/Hosting

http://tinyurl.com/5c8t4t" rel="nofollow - Add-Ons & Custom Code |

Posted By: Hamish
Date Posted: 12-March-2008 at 11:58am

Greg,
I was very interested to see those two websites and your notes on the approach.

Posted By: katharina
Date Posted: 12-March-2008 at 1:41pm

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

Posted By: J P Hill
Date Posted: 12-March-2008 at 2:29pm

Katharina,

We have also cut it down to the final two shopping cart vendors and we keep coming back to ProductCart. You make some very valid points and I agree that having dynamically generated pages works well as long as the Google feed is there and the page URLs don�t change with changes in the number of categories or products.

However, there are some of our products that need a lot of customer support to select the right product. I don�t see a dynamically generated page giving the customer adequate information on these pages and we need an alternative.

I think the alternative we are looking for is available from Greg Dinger of the GreyBeard Design Group. See his post above. I talked to him on the phone today. I am convinced he has the snippets of ASP code that we need to have static pages for those items that are too much for a dynamic page.

I am still open to other suggestions, but I like what I am hearing from you and Greg.