Customizing ShopSite

There are several ways that you can customize the ShopSite screens that your merchants see.

Put your company's name and address in the page footer
The footer of the main ShopSite screen has space for the name, phone number, and support e-mail address of your company. By default, this part of the screen is within an HTML comment tag so that it is not visible. It is highly recommended that you replace these placeholders with the real information for your company and remove the comment tags. You can also edit some of the other text in the footer. Open the global.aa file in the SHOPSITE_DIRECTORY directory and make the changes in the footer paragraph.
Put your company's logo in the page footer
You can replace the ShopSite logos that appears in the footer of every page with your own logo. Edit the global.aa file and change the vendor_logo and vendor_logo_smallvalue to point at your own graphic.
Modify the footer text on Back office screens.
The default footers on the Images, Digital Download, Custom Templates, and Custom Pages screens tell merchants how to upload content via FTP. You can remove or modify these footers by modifying the global.aa file. The following fields control the footers:
To remove the footer, simply leave the value blank, or you can modify the text in the value field.
Create your own "Keys to Seller Success" page
On the main ShopSite screen that merchants see, there is a link titled, "Keys to Seller Success." This link leads to a page that gives general advice about starting and running an online store. You can create your own page (or pages) and change the text and link on the ShopSite screen to point merchants to your page. Edit the isp.aa file in the SHOPSITE_DIRECTORY/nls/language directory and replace the help_text value with your own HTML string. (Note that the value for the help_text token in the isp.aa file overrides the value in the global.aa file.)
Customize the "Advertising" page
The Advertising button in the Merchandising section of ShopSite opens a page that briefly discusses using Internet advertising, and has a few links to companies that provide services. You can have this button lead to your own page about advertising by editing the global.aa file and setting the banner_ad_link value to the full URL of the destination page.
Customize the "Search Engines" page
The Search Engines button in the Merchandising section of ShopSite opens a page that briefly discusses search engines and has a few links to sites that help merchants register with search engines. You can have this button lead to your own page about search engines by editing the global.aa file and setting the search_engine_link value to the full URL of the destination page.
Offer "E-Marketing" services
The E-Marketing button in the Merchandising section of ShopSite links to a page on the ShopSite server. If you would like to offer your own e-marketing services or have the button link to another service, edit the global.aa file and change the value of the emarketing token to the full URL of the destination page.
Add a "Return To Mall" button on customer receipts
When a customer in any store in your mall concludes a purchase, she will see a receipt page in her browser. At the top of the receipt is a "Return to Store" button. You can place a "Return to Mall" button next to the existing button and define the destination link for that button.
  1. Open the global.aa file with a text editor.
  2. On a new line, add a marketplace: token, followed by the URL of the destination page, like this:

    marketplace: http://myhost/mall.html

  3. Save and close the file.
  4. For each store that you want to display the button, edit the sbdata.aa file in the store's data directory and add a new line with the following text:

    sb_show_mall: checked

Change the text on the "Finishing Up" page
When a new merchant completes the store setup wizard, he is presented with a "Finishing Up" page that offers congratulations and gives a few bits of advice, including who he can contact for help. You can customize this information by editing the isp.aa file in the SHOPSITE_DIRECTORY/nls/language directory.
Replace the standard graphics with your own
You can replace almost all of the graphics seen by sellers when they are configuring and administering their stores, including buttons and logos (Note that you cannot replace the ShopSite copyright notice and logo in the lower right part of the screen). All of the image files are in the shopsite-images directory that you defined during installation. If you replace any images, the new images must have the same file names and be the same dimensions as the original images.
Change the list of available colors
You can change the list of colors available to each store by editing the pagepalette.dat file located in the store's data directory. You can add or remove any color that you want in the pull-down list that the merchant sees. Just be sure the hex number has a '#' symbol in front of it (e.g. #FFE4C0). This does not allow you to directly enter hex color values from ShopSite -- you must still use the pull-down list. If you remove colors then certain Themes will not be available.
Customize error message displays
You can customize the headers and footers displayed with error messages. The error message screen that a merchant might see is comprised of an HTML header, the text of the error message, and an HTML footer. You cannot change the text of the error messages, but you can change the HTML header and footer. Create and edit the files bo_error_head.html and bo_error_tail.html in the ShopSite directory and in the Shopping Cart directory. Note that these files do not exist until you create them.
Toggle links to follow ShopSite on Facebook and Twitter
You can toggle the tiny icons below the ShopSite logo that link to ShopSite's Facebook and Twitter pages by editing the follow_ss token of the global.aa file. Set the token to yes to include the links and no to remove them.
Add local currencies
ShopSite comes with several currencies for each locale, but it may not have the currency for a particular country. You can add and enable additional currencies by editing the currency.dat file in the ShopSite directory. Follow the instructions and examples contained in the file to add currencies. After you save your changes, the new currencies will appear in the list of currencies that merchants can choose from in the wizard and in Preferences.
Restrict Merchant Access to Configuration Settings
You can control whether configuration fields are displayed to merchants on the Host Configuration screen, and which fields are editable.
  1. Open the global.aa file with a text editor.
  2. On a new line, add a settings: token and a space.
  3. If you don't want merchants to see any configuration settings, just save and close the file. ShopSite will display this message to merchants, "This feature has been disabled by your hosting service for security reasons." If you want to use your own message, add a new line with settings_display: and a space followed by the text of your message.
  4. To display all configuration settings but only allow merchants to edit some of them, list the editable settings after the settings: token. You can let merchants edit any of these settings:
    • email
    • mystore
    • security (enables all five security fields)
    • cgi (enables both CGI fields)

    5. For example, this line would allow merchants to edit their e-mail address and "my store" URL, but all other fields would be display-only:

    settings: email mystore

  5. Save and close the file.
Modify the default RSS feed in the backoffice dashboard or create additional default RSS feeds
When a merchant views the backoffice dashboard, there is a default RSS feed linked to ShopSite. This default RSS feed can be modified to display a different link. Additional default feeds can also be provided. To modify the default RSS feed:

  1. Open the global.aa file with a text editor.
  2. For the feed_link1: token, provide URL for the new RSS feed, then provide a name for the feed with the feed_name1: token.
  3. Optionally, Additional default feeds can be provided by creating additional feed_linkX and feed_linkX, where X is a whole number between 2 and 9.
  4. Save and close the file.
ShopSite Help and Resource Center
December 15, 2003
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