What is SalesCart?

SalesCart was the first shopping cart software program designed specifically to work in conjunction with an existing Web design program like Microsoft FrontPage, and is now a family of products. SalesCart allows you to design a professional shopping cart Web site without any prior programming knowledge.

SalesCart does for Electronic Commerce (E-commerce) what FrontPage does for Web page design. With literally no programming knowledge, SalesCart allows you to take your existing FrontPage Web site and add E-commerce capabilities directly to it.

SalesCart provides a FrontPage component called a Product Link that allows you to link your existing product Web pages directly to an order database. The order database is the mechanism used to keep track of each of your customer’s selections until they are ready for checkout. Pre-designed “check-out” pages (templates) guide your customers through the check-out process, which includes totaling their orders, selecting and calculating shipping options, confirming their orders, paying for their orders, and printing out receipts.

You have total control over the design and customization of your checkout pages and shopping cart, using Microsoft FrontPage. Furthermore, SalesCart requires no other software besides Microsoft FrontPage and Microsoft Access®.

Until SalesCart, there were three types of shopping cart software programs available on the market.

First, there were the simple Perl-based or ASP-based shopping cart systems that offered design flexibility but lacked the simplicity of use. These programs require that you have extensive programming and html knowledge .

Second, there was the expensive database-centric shopping cart system that lacked design flexibility and permitted little or no changes to the checkout system. This type of system requires specific support by your ISP.

Third, there were shopping cart services that offered simplicity but left you with virtually no control of the look and feel of the shopping cart – they were like something you rented. A shopping cart service runs completely on someone else's server and none of the product or shopping cart can be owned.

The list below categorizes the four general weaknesses of the these types of shopping carts.

Until SalesCart, most shopping cart software programs required programming knowledge to build and produce the shopping cart Web site. Many required a programmer to set up, configure, and customize them for your specific needs. These types of programs were not only difficult to set up, but they often required you to host the Web site with a particular Internet Service Provider (ISP) which provided a shopping cart service, so that you could build, manage, and keep the shopping cart working.

Although there are a few shopping cart systems that cost under $400, most cost thousands of dollars, with some topping the $5,000 range. The few shopping cart systems that are priced under $400 are usually Perl based and represented a “hodge-podge” of Perl programs where you, or someone you hired, built a one-time version of the shopping cart. Those not Perl based are really service-based carts where the entire shopping cart is owned and maintained by a separate company. In these cases, the foundation of your business is on a shopping cart rental rather than own basis. In the past, the rental philosophy was sound based on the price of shopping carts but nowadays, why rent when you can own for a fraction of the cost.

The systems that were not Perl based, required your shopping cart to follow a very strict design. They had to incorporate unchangeable templates, causing your lobby and product pages to look the same as all other shopping carts. In addition, these programs require that you build your Web site around the shopping cart, instead of adding the shopping cart to your existing Web site.

4. Require an Extensive hard-coded Product Database:

The biggest disadvantage of the shopping cart systems that are currently in the market is that they require a proprietary database of products. They require you to build an extensive product database for every product you intend to sell. A database can be important if you have a lot of products; however, in these products, the shopping cart and the product catalog system are joined and intimately fused. You are forced to re-enter all of your products into the shopping cart database before you can even take a single sale. This is the case, even if you already have a separate database of products or even if you have only a few items that you want to sell or distribute. This is a closed system. Thus, using these types of shopping carts may require you to keep and maintain several different database mechanisms. The complication and cost of maintaining separate systems becomes an enormous burden.

SalesCart solves all of these problems and more...

It is completely and directly integrated into FrontPage. A SalesCart shopping cart can be built and maintained by anyone. There is no complicated programming. Each product is linked and added by selecting the FrontPage Component from the Insert FrontPage Component Menu of FrontPage. In addition, if you need help, SalesCart comes with an extensive on-line Help feature that is directly integrated into your client version of FrontPage.

To display the Help feature, click on the icon.

SalesCart provides an initial FrontPage Web template and wizard that you can use to quickly build the basic shopping cart structure. Then you customize or apply a theme to the pre-built pages so that they take on the “look and feel” of the rest of your Web site. Finally, you add individual product pages for each of your products, along with product links for each item to the shopping cart, and you’re done! No programming is required.

If you need a database, you can quickly build a form with the fields you need, and use the built-in features of FrontPage to automatically build your database. Microsoft’s FrontPage Database Region Wizard located under the Insert menu will allow anyone to build and display a product database. SalesCart is 100% integrated into FrontPage, including the built-in database features. SalesCart also provides a Dynamic Database plug-in in cases where you don't have the time to build a product database.

SalesCart is inexpensive

SalesCart costs a fraction of what other comparable shopping carts cost. SalesCart is ideal for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who want to get rid of their own “hand-made” shopping cart systems together with the level of support required to make them work. With SALESCART, anyone can build a shopping cart for roughly the same cost as a conventional Perl-based “build-it-yourself” shopping cart.

SalesCart is flexible

SalesCart can be added to any existing Web site. If you already have Web pages which list your products, SalesCart can be quickly installed and your existing product pages can be quickly converted to SalesCart product pages. Removing an item is as simple as deleting it – nothing else is changed. When you want to place an item on sale, simply change the price the customer sees, then double-click on the SalesCart component to change the corresponding price. Changing a description or item number is just as easy. A product database is not required and your existing Web site designer can configure and change the shopping cart in one single step.

Since SalesCart uses FrontPage, the only limitations on the design of your shopping cart are the design elements which exist in FrontPage.

SalesCart does not require a Rigid Product Database, but can use a database that you build with FrontPage or one that is distributed with the Dynamic Database plug-in.

Adding SalesCart to an existing Web site is an easy process. SalesCart items are added using the FrontPage product link component supplied with SalesCart. Although SalesCart uses a database to keep track of Web orders, your individual Web pages dictate which items are added to the database as opposed to the database dictating what your Web site will look like. The order database provides a complete order and on-line customer tracking system, which is constantly kept up-to-date by your ever-expanding customer base.

SalesCart can also be integrated to work with existing or separate databases or catalog systems. If you use a separate database or catalog system to keep track of a large number of products, set the FrontPage product link component to use the existing dynamic output to display the catalog. In these cases, a SalesCart shopping cart system can literally be set-up in minutes once you know how to use Microsoft’s FrontPage Database Region Wizard. If you don't know or want to use the FrontPage Database Region Wizard, you can use the SalesCart Dynamic Database plug-in.