Ever heard about shopping cart? If you want to sell goods from your web site, you may want to look into shopping cart software so you can process your orders.

These days you don’t have to design your cart, you can just choose a web hosting company that has a built in shopping cart solution or use a third party merchant like PayPal.

What’s A Shopping Cart?

A Shopping Cart is a series of pages that are all linked together through some sort of programming that allows data to be transferred along with the viewer as he or she moves from page to page.

An example is when a woman enters a site that sells clothing. One page displays the dresses the site has for sale. Another displays the shoes, and yet another displays the accessories.
The woman clicks to purchase a dress. The purchase is then added to her “Shopping Cart”. She then moves to the shoes page and clicks to purchase a pair. That item too is added to her Shopping Cart. Finally, she moves to the accessories page and adds a scarf.

After choosing the items she wants to purchase, she clicks on the order page link and a page pops up listing all of her purchases with a final price added up. That’s the concept of a Shopping Cart.

It seems like a rather simple process on this side of the curtain, but behind the scenes, it’s quite a difficult task to get that purchase data to move along from page to page as the viewer shops around.

Build A Shopping Cart For Your Site

There are many choices for you to create an easy and configurable shopping cart that will meet your requirement. Many of these shopping carts is connected with online payment options so you don’t need to bother on how the money is come to your pocket. If you already use hosting service that have this feature, all you need to do is contact your hosting customer service on how to add this feature on your site.

But if there aren’t, no need to worry. There are many third party that will help you with this service with a little cut off on the payment. You can check CoffeeCup.com or EDirectHost.com for one of many third party services of a shopping chart. On this tutorial, I will bring you an easy way to create a shopping cart using service from CoffeeCup.

Shopping Cart Creator generates all the files you need to run your online shop, which means it can be used as a standalone Website. Additionally, the Pages tool gives you the option to add up to five custom Web-pages to your store. These can be used as a shop homepage, a FAQ, a refund policy page, etc.

However, if you already have a preexisting Website, you can easily incorporate your online shop. This is a two-step process:

Step 1: Uploading Your Shop
When you upload your shop, you’re going to need to tweak your normal FTP settings slightly. This is because you want to upload your shop to its very own sub-folder. You get to name this sub-folder whatever you want — we recommend using a name like “shop” or “store,” but it’s up to you.

How do you create this folder? Well, that depends on your hosting provider, as well as your remote folder. The most common way to create your shop’s sub-folder is to append your remote folder with /subfoldername. Subfoldername is the name of the sub-folder where you want your shop to be stored. Here are a few examples:

public_html/shop
www/store
/webshop

If you’re still unsure of what exactly to put in these fields, or if you’ve tried these options and your shop still isn’t uploading correctly, contact your hosting provider. Ask them what you should do to upload your files to a sub-folder.

Step 2: Integrating Your Shop
The first step can sometimes be a little tricky, but you’ll be happy to learn that the second step is as easy as creating a link on your Web-page. If you’re using an HTML editor such as CoffeeCup HTML Editor or the code editor in CoffeeCup Direct FTP, you’ll use this HTML:

<a href="Shop URL">Text you want to appear as a link</a>

Shop URL is the URL for your shop. You can use a relative or absolute link. For more information about relative versus absolute linking, read this article.

Text you want to appear as a link is the linked text your visitors will click on. “Read this article” in the preceding paragraph is linked text.

If you’re using Visual Site Designer, create and highlight the text or object you want to make into a link, and then click the Link button in the Toolbar. Check the Use Link check box, make sure the WWW radio button is selected, and enter the URL for your shop in the WWW field.

If you’re using menu-building software, such as Flash Menu Builder, you can create a new menu button and link it to the URL for your shop.

Unsure of how to determine the URL for your shop? No worries, it’s not that hard! If you appended the name of your remote folder with the name of your shop subfolder, it’s as simple as http://www.yourdomain.com/subfoldername. Here are a few examples:

http://www.mywebsite.com/shop

http://www.mysite.com/store

http://www.mydomain.com/webshop

If you contacted your hosting provider and they gave you a super-complicated method of adding a sub-folder, you might want to ask them how to easily find your shop URL.

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