Shopping Cart

Step 1 - Settings >

Shopping Cart

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This window contains the tools and options for creating and organizing an e-commerce shopping cart, where you can sell products on your website online. You can also sell digital products, such as e-books, graphic resources and software.

The first thing to do when creating an e-commerce shopping cart is to define the product catalog, organizing the products into appropriate categories and sub-categories. You will need to enter some basic information for each product, such as its name, description and price. You can, however, add further details, for example photographs, variations of color, size and model, etc. You can write your texts more easily using MagicText, the artificial intelligence-based text generation assistant integrated in WebSite X5 Pro (starting from version 2023.2). MagicText understands natural language and it can write ideas, titles, SEO titles, paragraphs and tags in different languages and styles.

When you have created your product catalog, you can specify shipping and payment methods and compose the order form, including e-mails that are sent by the shopping cart object to the website Administrator and the customers who place an order.

The options for defining the various elements in the e-commerce shopping cart, and how they work, are organized in the following sections:

Product List
Order Management
Customer Details
Sending order
Options

When the shopping cart is complete, you have to add the information and necessary links in the website so that customers can display the information on the products and make their purchases. You can do this in three ways:

1.By including the "Buy now" button in the product presentation pages as you create them, using the Add to Cart link (see Link).
2.By creating the product presentation pages with the Product Catalog Object to use cards that already include the "Buy now" button.
3.By using the Product Search Page which is automatically created by collecting and presenting all the available details in an organized way.

In addition to the "Buy now" button, you can activate a button Customers can use to add the Products to their personal Wishlist, so they can better organize their purchases on your store. The Wishlist button can be easily added to the Product Cards used in the Product Catalog Object, in the Product Search Page and in the Product Sheet Pages.

The e-commerce Cart created with WebSite X5 is a separate section of the Main Site and involves the automatic creation of some Special Pages in the Map: one for the Home Page, one for the Search Page and one for the Product Sheet Page. To insert the cart or Search Page in the Navigation Menu, you need to create an Alias of the Special Pages by selecting them and dragging them into the Menu folder.

When you create an e-commerce, the Special Pages "E-Commerce: Cart and Checkout" and "E-Commerce: Search page", "E-Commerce: Product Sheet Page" and "E-Commerce: Wishlist" are automatically created on the Sitemap, the latter beig present only if the specific function to display the Wishlist has been already activated. You can select a Special Page and click on Properties to access the Page Properties window and define the main properties or click on Edit to define the graphic settings.

Access to the e-commerce shopping cart can be restricted to registered users who have a login and a password. To do this, select the "Shopping cart: cart", "Shopping Cart: Search" and/or "Shopping Cart: Product Sheet Page" Special Page in the map and use the command to set the page as locked (see Step 3 - Map). According to the result you want to achieve, you can either set all the Shopping Cart pages or some of them only as locked.

See How to create a members' area and define access to it or further information on setting up a Members' Area and defining access to it by creating user groups.

Once the project has been published online, your online shop is ready to accept orders from customers. You can manage your orders in the relative section of WebSite X5's online Control Panel.

The Control Panel can be found at the http//www.mysite.com/admin URL, where http//www.mysite.com is the URL of the website to which the online shop is linked, and is open to all the users who have been added to the Administrator group in the Access Management section of Step 1 - Settings.

For more information see: How to manage orders and products with the online Control Panel

The online store created with WebSite X5 can be easily integrated with Facebook and Instagram to sell your products on the Facebook Shop and with the Instagram shoppable posts. You just need to enable integration so to generate the .csv file reporting the product catalog to be connected to Facebook.

For more information about how to integrate the store with Facebook and Instagram, please see: How to sell your products on Facebook Shops and with the Instagram Shoppable Posts.

When you test the website offline, a message warns you that the order will not be sent and you will be redirected automatically to the order confirmation page. The e-commerce shopping cart will be fully functional when the website has been published on the server.

The server on which the website is published must support the PHP language and the Mail command must be enable, for your e-commerce shopping cart to work correctly. You can retrieve this information on server diagnostics from the WebSite Test section of the online Control Panel.

If you encounter problems in sending e-mails, it is probable that the server you are using does not have a standard configuration. Try changing the settings for the script and the e-mail send method, using the options in Server Settings | E-mails. For further information, contact your web space provider.

 


Read the guides:

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How to create a e-commerce

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How to present the products of your catalog

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How to manage orders and products with the online Control Panel

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What's MagicText and how can I use it to generate text contents