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SalesCart was the first shopping cart software program designed specifically to work with a web design tool, originally Microsoft FrontPage®, and is now a family of products on multiple design tools including Macromedia Dreamweaver® and UltraDev®. SalesCart is also offered on a variety of platforms including ASP, PHP, Access and SQL. Because we were the first to create this vertical class of software products, we named this type of software -- Design Tool E-CommerceTM. SalesCart allows you to design a professional shopping cart website without any prior programming knowledge.
With literally no programming knowledge, SalesCart allows you to take your existing Design tool built website and add E-commerce capabilities directly to it.
SalesCart provides a Product Link that allows you to link your existing product webpages 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 your web design tool. Furthermore, SalesCart requires no other software to start building your website.
Until SalesCart, there were three types of shopping cart software programs available on the market.
Even to this day, most shopping carts, beside SalesCart, fall into one of these 3 general classifications. |
The list below categorizes the four general weaknesses of the PERL based and catalog-centric shopping carts.
1. Difficult
Until SalesCart, most shopping cart software programs required programming knowledge to build and produce the shopping cart website. Many still require a programmer to set up, configure, and customize them for your specific needs. These types of programs are not only difficult to set up, but they often require you to host the website with a particular Service Provider (ISP) which provides the shopping cart service and keep the shopping cart working.
2. Expensive
Although there are a few shopping cart systems that cost under $400, most cost thousands of dollars, with some topping the $5,000 range. In addition, the licensing of many of these shopping carts are on a per domain basis. The few shopping cart systems that are priced under $400 are usually PERL based and represented a “hodge-podge” of PERL programs. Those not PERL based are typically 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 basis rather than true ownership.
3. Rigidity
The systems that are not PERL based require your shopping cart to follow a very strict design. They incorporate unchangeable or difficult to change 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 website around the shopping cart, instead of adding the shopping cart to your existing website.
4. Extensive hard-coded Product catalog 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 catalog-centric shopping carts, 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 true, 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 require you to keep and maintain several different database mechanisms: 1) your current method of tracking product descriptions and prices; 2) your website method; and 3)your product database. The complication and cost of maintaining three separate systems can become an enormous burden.
SalesCart solves all of these problems and more...
SalesCart is simple
It is completely and directly integrated into your website design tool. A SalesCart shopping cart can be built and maintained by anyone. There is no complicated programming. Each product is linked and added by selecting a product link from the design tool menu. In addition, if you need help, SalesCart comes with an extensive on-line Help feature that is directly integrated.
SalesCart provides an initial template and wizard that you can use to quickly build the basic shopping cart structure and check-out pages. 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 website. 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 have a lot of products and need a database, no problem. SalesCart is one of the few shopping carts that can run statically as well as dynamically. You can purchase optional plugins and tools including the Product Management plugin. But what's different about the SalesCart approach is that SalesCart uses the built-in features of your design tool to automatically build your database and catalog. So that makes it easy for you to change or extend our catalog functionality. Use Microsoft’s FrontPage Database Region Wizard or Macromedia's Database Server behaviors within the design tool. All versions of SalesCart are 100% integrated into this web design tools built-in database features.
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 eliminate their own “hand-made” shopping cart systems and the support required to make them work. With the price of SalesCart, anyone can build a shopping cart.
SalesCart is flexible
SalesCart can be added to any existing website. If you already have webpages that list your products, SalesCart can be easily 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 website designer can configure and change the shopping cart in one single step. If you are using the Product Management plugin, a very easy-to-use browser-based interface allows you to change product descriptions and prices and use can use your design tool to easily change the template to match your website design look and feel.
Few design limits
Because SalesCart works with your web design tool, the only limitations to the design of your storefront are the design elements you can create or that exist in your design tool.
SalesCart does not require a product or catalog Database and can run statically as well as dynamically.
Adding SalesCart to an existing website is an easy process. SalesCart items are added using the product link component supplied with SalesCart. Although SalesCart uses a database to keep track of website orders, your individual webpages dictate which items are added to the database, as opposed to the database dictating what your website will look like. The optional Order Management plugin 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 product link component to use the existing dynamic output to display the catalog. If your not sure how to use the product and database catalog features of your web design tool, you can use the SalesCart Product Management plugin to instantly create a dynamic catalog based shopping cart that is open. So as you learn how to use the FrontPage database region wizard or the Macromedia database server behaviors inherent in your web design tool, you will be able to extend, change and modify the SalesCart product template pages on your own.