[ main menu ] The Hostahoy Shopping Cart is a powerful and flexible system that can be altered to do just about anything you would require from an e-commerce solution. Here are some tricks and shortcuts that our users have brought to our attention thus far. If you have anything to add, send an email to suggestions@hostahoy.com. How to use "cookies" with the Hostahoy Shopping Cart or give resellers credit for sales from your store: You can now set "cookies" by calling your store with any arguments that you want carried through the session and sent to you on the order confirmations. This is really an argument that is carried through rather than a "cookie" since it does not require the use of the browser's cookies. For example, if you wanted to make sure that your reseller "BobbieJoe" gets credit for any sales that come from his site, have BobbieJoe use the following argument when calling the cart: [username]STORE:BobbieJoeCKIE:home The format is simple: just insert the "cookie" followed by "CKIE:" between "STORE:" and "home". Very Important: since this is an argument (information appended to a cgi) you cannot use spaces or other non alphabet characters or digits. For example, these would not work: Bobbie Joe
To use multiple cookies, separate each by a colon (:). Example: [username]STORE:BobbieJoe:newaccount:10percentCKIE:home Once the order is placed, this "cookie: information will appear only in the confirming email to the vendor and the order that can be called up by the Web browser in the Admin area. It will be displayed under the heading "COOKIE(S)" How to make your domain name or an index file pull up your store without calling the CGI with variables: By default, the Hostahoy Shopping Cart store is called using variables appended to the CGI. Since the store is dynamic, it requires this information. You can however create an "index.cgi" file that is a simple perl script that will call your store. Here is an example: http://hostahoy.com/cgi-bin/cart/cart.cgi?sampleSTORE:home is the URL that would have to be typed or linked to a Web page to enter the store. By creating an "index.cgi" file that contains the following simple code: #!/usr/local/bin/perl print "Location:http://hostahoy.com/cgi-bin/cart/cart.cgi?sampleSTORE:home\n\n"; exit; We were able to access this store by simply typing: Here is what you need to do: 1) make sure your web server's srm.conf file has "index.cgi" listed as a valid index file. If not, simply add it in and restart your web server. 2) create the index.cgi, modify the code to call your store, and place the index.cgi file in the home HTML directory that the domain name calls. Make sure the index.cgi file mode is 755 (executable). Another way to do this would be by running your store within a frame. See below for details. How to run your store from a frame and make the long URLs go away: Running the Hostahoy Shopping Cart from a frame can add a more customized look to the store plus make the store appear to run "cleaner" by not displaying the long URLs in the URL window. You can of course customize the frame sizes and options to whatever you prefer, but here are some simple settings that works best for our stores. 1) in your stores/[username] directory, create the following file
2)
rename your current index.html file "index2.html" How to Create and HTML link that can link to any product or category in your store For linking products use the following URL pattern, replacing our information with your information that applies to your store: Example: http://www.hostahoy.com/cgi-bin/cart/cart.cgi?sampleSTORE:prod12345678+ Pattern: http://[your domain]/cgi-bin/cart/cart.cgi?[store username]STORE:prod[product code]+ Linking categories is just as simple: Example: http://www.hostahoy.com/cgi-bin/cart/cart.cgi?sampleSTORE:widgets++++CATEGORY Pattern: http://[your domain]/cgi-bin/cart/cart.cgi?[store username]STORE:[category name]++++CATEGORY *If you have spaces in your category name, you must use a "%20" in place of each space in the URL. You must however use the "use thumbnails" option in the basic administration for this to work. How to list items in any order The Hostahoy Shopping Cart lists all items in the store in order by product code. Therefore we recommend appending a number to each product code. This number will give you control over where you want the item in your store. For example, if you have about 100 products, you may just want to use a 3 digit number before each product code. This should allow you enough flexibility to place new products wherever you want in the store. Easily translate the Hostahoy Shopping Cart into any language (providing you are fluent in that language!) The Hostahoy Shopping Cart is "translation ready" meaning that all source files can be easily edited for any language. To translate: 1) open
up each ASCII file in the cart directory and look at the header. Some
files do not need any translation - these files have a Language of "ALL". Most
files however will have the following headers:
2) Scroll through each file and look for the "# TRANSLATE ->" line. This line will always be followed by an English word, phrase or sentence(s) that will need to be replaced with it's translated equivalent. Remember that these are Perl files, so some knowledge of Perl is helpful but not needed. Just be aware that quotes and some other foreign characters may have to be literalized with a preceding backslash. For upgrades, all new or changed text that needs translation will have the version number after the "# TRANSLATE" tag. This makes it easy for those who have already translated earlier versions to quickly translate all upgrades. How to include icons like "Sale" or "Going Fast" in your store: This is a simple task that just requires that you add the link in HTML to the ICON in your product description code. Therefore the images will show up when your product is called. Make sure you use the full URL to the images since the script is run from the cgi-bin directory. How to "hide" categories in the example of seasonal products: If your store has different products for different seasons and does not want to offer certain products at certain times, you can maintain several different databases. This would require the use of FTP administration. You would create a "cart_db.txt" database file for each "season" and upload the appropriate file as needed. You may need to adjust the categories in the basic administration for each database file you maintain but that should be it. How to setup your store so users can choose a different or even multiple shipping destinations: By default, the Hostahoy Shopping Cart provides all the fields for billing address only. If your store normally requires both a bill to and ship to address, you can use the "additional customer information" fields in the basic administration area to add ship to fields. We suggest you add a comment stating the fields only need to be filled out if ship to information is different than shipping information. For multiple shipping addresses in the same order, we suggest the use of an text area box in place of individual entry fields. Then a comment field like:
Since
this is a less automated procedure, shipping charges cannot be automatically
calculated. If multiple shipping destinations constitute a majority of your
orders we suggest you place a statement on your store home page that one order
should be placed for each destination. True support for multiple shipping
destinations will be added in an upcoming release. The "states" drop down menu that comes with the Hostahoy Shopping Cart has all the states for both US and Canada. However if the bulk of your business is not in these two countries, you can add states/provinces to the "states.txt" file in your cart directory. |
