This is intended to be a guide for the content administrators of @package_name@. Content administrators are not assumed to have any technical expertise (although HTML knowledge is necessary if you want to edit product templates).
These are the basic steps needed to get @package_name@ up and
running. Most functions below can be performed using the
@package_name@ administration pages in
First make sure that the technical setup has been taken care of. Although most of it can be done quickly, the process of setting up a merchant account to accept credit cards can take weeks, so don't procrastinate!
You will need to answer the following questions for whomever will be administring @package_name@ site parameters, and for those individuals adding products or services to your site.
If you don't know what some of these questions mean, read on. These should make sense after you've finished reading this page.
What units of currency and weight (e.g. USD and lbs) will be used throughout the site.
Whether you are selling hard goods that require shipping and/or soft goods and services that are not being shipped.
How many products to display per page when the customer is browsing (default 10).
Whether to allow users to write public comments of the products and, if so, whether the comments need to be approved (by you) before they appear on the site.
Whether you want product relationships (e.g. "people who bought product A also bought products B, C, and D") to be calculated and displayed
Regarding user classes (i.e., classes that you might place users in like "publisher" or "student" for purposes of giving discounts or different views of the site):
Do you want them to know what classes they're in?
Can they request via the web site to be placed into user classes, and
if so, do they automatically become a member of any user class they request to be a part of, or do their requests need to be approved by an administrator first?
What percentage of the shipping charges should be refunded if a customer returns their purchases.
Whether express shipping, and pickups at your location are available.
Whether you want to save credit card data (if so, customers can reuse their credit card with one click; if not, the credit card number is deleted after the order has shipped).
How large you want the automatically-generated thumbnail images of the products to be (you can specify either the width or the height, in pixels; the dimension you don't specify will vary based on the original image's size).
What product stock messages you want to be able to choose from when adding/editing products (e.g. "Out of Stock", "Usually Ships Within 24 Hours", "Usually Ships Within 2-3 Days", etc.).
The number of days a user's shopping cart will stay valid before it goes into the 'expired' state.
Whether to allow preorders for items that are not yet available.
The email address that will be used for all email sent from the system to the customers.
Whether people fulfilling the orders should be alerted if there's a problem reauthorizing a credit card for payment (which happens when orders are shipped) -- you'll want them to be alerted if they're in a position to do anything about the problem (e.g. abort the shipment); otherwise, there's no need to alert them because the problem will still be logged so that someone else can take care of it.
Whether customers are allowed to purchase gift certificates for others and, if so, the minimum and maximum amounts of money that the gift certificates can be worth as well as the number of months until the gift certificates expire.
Set up product categorization (
Product categories, subcategories and subsubcategories are optional, but if you intend to offer many products for sale, it is best to think about how they should be categorized before you enter any products into the database. The categorization is used when displaying the products and when the customer is searching for products.
Here is an example to help you decide how you want to categorize your products. Say you are a publisher and you are selling a variety of books and periodicals. You may wish to divide your goods into two categories: books and periodicals. The subcategories of books will be: fiction, biography, history, science, and so on. The subcategories of periodicals will be: health & fitness, sports, news, beauty, and so on. If you want to go a level deeper, you can subdivide science, for instance, into physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and so on.
Another example: say you sell CDs and nothing else. Then your categories can be: classical, rock, jazz, international, etc. You will probably not need to use subcategories.
What if one of your products spans two categories? That's OK; you are allowed to put a product into as many categories (and subcategories and subsubcategories) as you like. So, if you're selling the Girl From Ipanema CD, you can put it into both the jazz and the international categories so that your customers can find it in both places.
Set up your shipping cost rules (
Check out the
Set up your sales tax rules (
Decide if you want to add any custom product fields. First
look at the current fields available (
Create new product display templates (
You can modify the default template that @package_name@ comes with to incorporate your custom product fields, to exclude fields you don't use, or just change the way it looks to fit whatever design scheme you want to use. The template is written in AOLserver's ADP language, which is just HTML with Tcl variables (or commands) inside <% and %> tags. It is extremely easy. It you can write HTML, you can write ADP. If you can't, you can hire someone cheaply to do it for you.
You can create as many additional templates as you like. You can associate templates with product categories so that every product in the "book" category is automatically assigned the "book" template by default, although you can always assign any template you want to any product you want (so if you have an unusual product, you can give it an unusual template).
Set up user classes (
Depending on your settings in the ini file, users may or may not be able to see which user classes they're a member of (so be careful of what you call them!).
If a user is a member of more than one class and there are special prices on the same product for both classes, the user will receive whichever price is lowest.
Enter your products into the database. This can be done
using the simple form at
However, if you have many products already stored in another
database, you will not want to enter them one by one.
Instead, export them into a CSV file (or a series of CSV
files), and manipulate them into the formats documented at
After you've added a product, there are a variety of things you can do to it, such as:
Add product recommendations (
Recommendations are displayed when the customer is browsing the site, either on the home page (if a product is recommended at the top level), or when the customer is browsing categories, subcategories, or subsubcategories.
You can also associate product recommendations with a user class. E.g., you might only want the book "Improving your GRE Scores" to only be recommended to Students.
Modify the email templates (
The current templates are functional but should probably be edited to reflect your company better.
That's it for setup! Of course, your customers won't be very happy until you can do things like order fulfillment, so it's time to read about operation of @package_name@.