Shopping Cart Setup

 

Overview:

The Nebula Accounting On-Line System automatically and dynamically creates an E-Commerce site from the information that you enter into the Item Families, Item Categories, and Items. Item Families and Item Categories are used to allow large numbers of inventory items to be easily organized. Please give careful thought to the Item Families and Item Category set-up in the system.

You can get a good feel for how the Families and Categories work by reviewing the sample shopping cart data and how it is organized. 

After you become familiar with the system,  you would probably like to change the visual interface of the Nebula Accounting’s integrated Shopping Cart. In order to do this, you have to know the links needed by the shopping cart and how they work.

Read this section carefully as it contains information about the various categories of links the shopping cart uses:

The Product Families Link:

This is the page that your customers will visit first. It displays the main family of products your company is selling, or any other services it provides.

If you have installed the Nebula Accounting software at www.yoursite.com/iainternet

The location of the product’s families page is www.yousite.com/iainternet/shoppingcart/cartfamilies.asp

The Product Categories Link:

After the customer enters the families page, the asp code automatically generates the category table, for the item categories that belong to that item family. This table contains the category of products, items or services.

The syntax of a category link is:

http://www.yoursite.com/iainternet/shoppingcart/cartcategories.asp?criteria=FamilyID='Accessories'

As you can see, the categories’ family ID is passed as a parameter to the cartcategories.asp file.

Further, the cartcategories.asp can process the items table using the following link:

http://www.yoursite.com/iainternet/shoppingcart/cartitems.asp?family=%3D%27Accessories%27&criteria=CategoryID='Misc+Accessories'

The link passes to the cartitems.asp page the items’ category, in this example ‘Misc Accessories”.

The items are displayed 3 in a row, having displayed below the link that will actually insert them in the shopping cart.

The Product Items Link:

An example of an item link follows:

http://www.yoursite.com/iainternet/shoppingcart/carttab.asp?tblname=lsItems&LastOrd=0&Action=AddToCart&ID=Dog+Shampoo

Where:   tblname is the name of  the items table in the database

            LastOrd is used to count the number of identic items in the shopping car

            Action is set to AddToCart

            The ID parameter contains the item name.  

Using this method of adding items to the cart is very useful if you don't want to use Nebula Accounting On-Line's automatically generated e-commerce site but still want the shopping cart and order checkout functionality.

View Orders / Checkout:

To access the checkout screen, use the following link:

http://www.yoursite.com/iainternet/shoppingcart/cartorder.asp

Important Note: As with any other shopping carts, the customer ordering your products must have an account at your company. If he does not already have an account, the shopping cart supports the automatic creation of customer accounts on the fly, and this information is automatically posted to the accounting systems customer table.

Adding Referrals Support to the Shopping Cart

To add referral support to your site for tracking salesman commission, please follow this simple example:

If for example your shopping cart is located at:

www.yousite.com/iainternet/shoppingcart/cartfamilies.asp

Attach to this link with the following parameter:

Ref=SALESMANID, where SALESMANID is the ID of the salesman as it is defined in the Employees screen in the accounting system.

Examples:

www.yousite.com/iainternet/shoppingcart/cartfamilies.asp?Ref=JohmMK

www.yousite.com/iainternet/shoppingsart/cartfamilies.asp?Ref=DANIA

Once the users order your products, the salesman will get a sales commission for every sale as it is defined in the Employees screen.