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.

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 "Banner Ads" page

The Banner Ads button in the Merchandising section of ShopSite opens a page that briefly discusses using banner advertising, and has a few links to companies that provide that service. You can have this button lead to your own page about banner ads 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.

Open the global.aa file with a text editor.

On a new line, add a marketplace: token, followed by the URL of the destination page, like this:
marketplace: http://myhost/mall.html

Save and close the file.

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.

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.

ShopSite Help and Resource Center
February 22, 2002
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