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Working with ShopSite
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How Do I Link My Existing Web Site with My ShopSite Store?
If you have an existing Web site and are just getting started with ShopSite, you may want to link the two sites together, rather than consolidate them into a single site. Although it is difficult to present customers with a seamless experience this way, everything should work fine, including going to and from ShopSite store pages and the shopping cart.
To link your ShopSite store and another Web site:
- Plan which pages on your existing site will link to which pages in your ShopSite store and vice-versa. Planning any Web site, especially two that are interlinked, is the first step in creating a site that accomplishes what you want it to.
- Write down the URLs of the pages that you want to link in both your ShopSite store and your other Web site. You will need these URLs to create the links between the two sites.
- The URL of the main page of your store was given to you by your ISP. It may be something like www.yourstore.com. Do not use the URL of the back office to your store, which is something like www.yourisp.com/shopsite/start.cgi.
- You can define the URLs of other pages in your store by setting the File Name field when you create the pages. If you name a page t-shirts.html then the URL of that page would be something like www.yourstore.com/t-shirts.html. If you don’t name the pages, ShopSite names them page1.html, page2.html, etc., which does not tell you what is on each page.
- Add hypertext links in your existing Web site where you want customers to be able to access your store. To add a link that goes to the main page of your store, insert HTML tags in the following format:
<a href="www.yourstore.com">Visit our store!</a>
To insert a link to a specific page, the HTML tags might look more like this:
<a href="www.yourstore.com/t-shirts.html">Buy a groovy T-shirt!</a>
- Add hypertext links in your ShopSite pages where you want customers to be able to go back to your non-ShopSite Web site. You can place the links in several places on a ShopSite page:
- You can place the link in a header or footer that you can appear on every page. Go to the Store Preferences section of ShopSite and click on Page Header & Footer, then put something like the following text in the Header or Footer field:
<a href="www.yoursite.com">Return to yoursite.com</a>
- To have the link appear before/above any products on a page, edit the page info and put the link in the Text 1 field (Advanced Editing) or the Description field (Basic Editing).
- To have the link appear above or below the footer you must use the Advanced Editing mode and put the link in the Text 2 or Text 3 field, respectively.
- Publish your ShopSite store, and upload any changed pages in your other Web site to your server.
- Test the links.
- Use your browser to access your Web site and click on a link that takes you to your store.
- Click an [Order] button in your store and verify that you reach the shopping cart.
- Click the Continue Shopping button and verify that you return to the page in your store where you clicked the [Order] button.
- Click a link to go back to your non-ShopSite Web site.
- Click another link to return to the store.
- Click an [Order] or [Checkout] button to return to the shopping cart. Verify that the first item you clicked on is still displayed in the shopping cart.
You can use the OrderAnywhere Linker to add [Checkout] buttons to pages in your non-ShopSite Web site to make it easy for customers to reach the shopping cart.
