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Creating your own online store
Installing and configuring storefront scripts
The program provides sophisticated tools for creating your own online store.
This feature is an extension of the concept of creating catalogs of the required format from the same source data.
Our software aims to help you create your very own
fully functional online store if consider a custom solution
to be unduly expensive, free solutions - overcomplicated, or your existing online store - not sufficiently functional.
Your advantages with our solution include:
- Support for several popular online store engines. Choose the one that most suits you!
- No need to install and configure scripts or do other strange things - the distributive includes a custom edition of osCommerce with a fully automated installation routine.
- The program takes care of all the time-consuming routine works, such as preparing and uploading the entire product list, product descriptions and photos.
The photos are automatically scaled and formatted according to your settings.
Over 160 variants of original decoration of photos to choose from.
What would normally require days of manual work, the program does automatically within minutes.
Along the way, it solves the problem of finding items and making changes to the product list.
All that is accessible from the friendly interface of a regular desktop application! - We offer dozens of free demo servers for test-driving these features without having to install anything on your own server.
Simply select a server from the list and upload your data to it.
Check out how easy it is!
To open the online store window, click on the E-Store button on the main toolbar or select the 'Service'-'E-Store' item on the menu.
Virtually all the required information is given in the corresponding windows, where it is needed, so now we are just going to clarify some points.
This information applies to any store to be set up.
The 'What' tab
First of all, choose the store engine that you would like to use.
(See the Store Engine Comparison chart)
Next, select, which items you are going to to upload to your online store; if you need to customize the selected items, here you can do that too.
Please take a note of the objects to be uploaded - in your daily work, you do not always need to repost all the photos, settings or appearance of the store.
By clearing the unnecessary items, you can considerably speed up the upload process; for example, you could leave only the updated stock on the upload list. The standard working configuration for the installation and upload testing has the "Stock", "Images" and "New only" items selected.
Let's say a few words on each item.
- Stock. If the checkbox is selected, the program will upload all your product data to the store.
You can have the program to upload the stock (More) and the images (More). Please note that you cannot upload the images separately from the stock. Only along with the stock.
In the regular operating mode, you may want to upload only new images.
During the initial upload and when changing image parameters, repost all the photos.
After you have set up images, you may want to select "Upload images for the first 10 items only, to preview the result". This is especially useful when changing image sizes and styles.
When you turn off uploading images, it doesn't mean that you won't have any photos in your store; whatever you have posted before that moment - will be displayed, just the _new_ and _updated_ photos will no longer be uploaded. - E-store settings. Applies to osCommerce only. If the option is selected, the settings will be updated. More
- E-store appearance. Applies to osCommerce only. You can select a suitable template from over 160 variants (for other stores, you can choose the decoration of photos from the same set on the image settings form). The selected template modifies the default store template and does not affect your own, custom, appearance template (uploading appearance settings from the program in this case does not make sense).
Selecting "Decorate photos with colors from this template" sets image properties to suit the color palette of the template. You can check out the result in the image settings window.
You can combine templates. Select a template and upload it to the website without uploading the images and then select a different template and repost all the images without reposting the appearance settings. Play with it; you can come up with a very untrivial combination!
The "Where" tab
When using the free version, select a demo store (or leave the default selection) on the 'Where' tab.
(If after uploading your data you see someone else's data there, probably someone else, besides you, is uploading their data to the same store. Simply select a different server.)
For a commercial version, install the store scripts to your server and enter the settings of your online store in the program.
In the demo mode, you cannot edit the data. Select a server from the drop-down list or leave the randomly selected one.
On this tab, enter the Internet address of your online store, name of the script file (depends on the selected store, see the chapter on setting up a particular store) and password for accessing the database.
The name of the script file depends on the selected store (find out more in the section on installing and configuring a particular store), login and password - database user name and password, specified during the preparation of the server.
For security reasons, you may want to rename the script on the server and change the login and password in it by entering your own, move it to a different folder (in this case, you may need to check the path to the configuration file of the store).
The script includes an example of how to do that.
All these parameters are automatically set upon a successful automatic installation of the software on the server (osCommerce only).
To test the results, click on the 'Go to the E-Store' button after uploading your data. To configure the store from the Web, click
'Online Administration'. If necessary, contact the technical support to get the login and password to the Web panel of the demo store.
(Note: During the installation, some store scripts advise to rename the administration folder. If you do this, the direct link from the program, 'Online Administration', will no longer work, and in order to enter the administration panel, you will need to enter its correct address in your browser manually. For example, http://mydomain.com/myshop/secret_admin_folder/ )
The 'Upload' tab
Once you have decided, what you are going to upload (on the 'What' tab) and where you are going to upload that (on the 'Where' tab), simply click Start on the UPLOAD tab to begin uploading your online store!
The first command to be run is Test. If this very first operation returns an error,
check whether the data you have entered on the 'Where' tab is correct. Either the path to the store/script or the authentication login/password could be invalid.
Hide intermediate tasks after completion. It is recommended to leave this option selected.
After a successful upload of the store data, you can feast your eyes on the result.
Enter the store's address in your browser's address bar or click 'Go to the E-Store' on the 'Where' tab.
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