Create Online Store – How to Quickly and Easily Build an Ecommerce Store Part 3

Create Online Store Part 1
Create Online Store Part 2

So you’ve built your customized template, downloaded and unzipped your shopping cart software into a folder on your computer and created a database for your online store.

The next stage is to integrate the shopping cart software with your customized template.

How to Intregrate the PHP Ecommerce Plus Shopping Cart Software With Your Customized Template.

Step 1

Copy and paste the 5 include lines shown below into content area of your html template.


<?php include "vsadmin/db_conn_open.php" ?>
<?php include "vsadmin/includes.php" ?>
<?php include "vsadmin/inc/languagefile.php" ?>
<?php include "vsadmin/inc/incfunctions.php" ?>
<?php include "vsadmin/inc/inccategory.php" ?>

I placed them between the

tags that normally contain the content.

Step 2.

Edit the last line of include code to reflect the name of the page you are creating. e.g. for the category page the last line of code is


<?php include "vsadmin/inc/inccategory.php" ?>

Make sure each page has the php extension. ie category.php

Step 3.

Do the same for the 8 main store web pages

*Affiliate.php
* Cart.php
* Categories.php
* Proddetail.php
* Products.php
* Search.php
* Sorry.php
* Thanks.php
* You can also set up an order status, order tracking and customer login page

Step 4.

Add a line of code to the top of each page. This goes before the opening tag with absolutely no spaces before or after:


<?php
session_cache_limiter('none');
session_start();
ob_start(); ?>

NOTE:

The home page will be the only html page that does not contain the includes files unless you want to include products on it. If so, just do the same for this page as the categories.php page above and name it home.php. Create a category for this page in the admin panel. You could then be able to add products to it from the admin panel as well as to the main category they would normally go into.

There is a checkbox at the bottom of the product admin page to create additional categories.

You can do the same for the best products page or any other additional pages you wish to create etc. This allows you to edit the products within the admin panel without having to edit the html.

Step 5.

Add links to your product pages in the navigation bar. This will make it easy for visitors to navigate your online store.

Step 6.

Upload all files to the server.

Step 7.

Create category pages and add products to them from the admin panel.

Step 8.

Select a credit card payment processor.

Some of these include:

Google Checkout
Authorize.net
PayPal / PayPal Pro
2Checkout
Linkpoint
WorldPay
Barclays ePDQ
NOCHEX / Protx / SECpay

If you use PayPal, Google Checkout or 2Checkout to process credit card payments you won’t have to bother with a merchant account, payment processor, SSL certificate or shopping cart. It takes care of all this for you.

If you want your money deposited directly into your bank account select one of the other payment processors.

Once you have all your product categories and pages built and a method to accept online payments you can begin selling your products.

Conclusion

In order to build a successful online store you need to attract lots of visitors. So your final step is to create a marketing plan.

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Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)
owner and author of Web Design, Web Hosting, SEO

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