Your Shop

The moment you define your first product using the Admin Control Panel, it is ready for sale on your shop. This chapter describes the features of your shop and tells you how to link to it from other web pages of yours or your affiliates.

Note: The screenshots below are from the Pro version of . In the standard version, the Pro features and options will not be presented.

Basic Shop

Your shop front generated by is shown in the image below. You can access it by browsing to your installation in the standalone versions. In the WordPress plugin versions, you will use the so-called shortcodes to access the shop front, as described below.

Standalone Versions

In standalone verions, both the Pro and the Lite (also called the Standard) editions, you can access your e-shop by simply browsing to the location where you installed . If you are logged in, you will see the following screen, giving you all the actions you can take as the administrator.

If you are not logged in to your , you will see your e-shop directly, which is the view your customers will be presented with. Note that even in this view, there is an easy access link to your admin page. Clicking on it, while not being logged in, will bring up a login request.

Buy and Show Links

Similar to the WordPress plugin version, the standalone version also has the "Buy Now" and the count-down links. The format for a "Buy Now" link would be http://yoursite/?buy=product_code, which takes your customer directly to PayPal site. And http://yoursite/?show=product_code takes them to a product information page, which redirects to the PayPal payment page in 15 seconds. The customer can abort the count-down if they so choose.

Advanced Shop

The basic shop front generated by may not be fancy enough for your purposes. It is possible to develop fancier presentations of the shop front. In my own e-shop, for instance, I make use of the product_meta table to generate the following e-shop.

While this shop front may not look much fancier than the basic one, note how products are grouped together based on their categories, and how links to product description pages are presented. Furthermore, the product information page (http://yoursite/?show=product_code) also uses the information in the meta table as shown below.

Customization

Setting up an advanced shop requires some PHP programming and database manipulations. If you want to get it done by your in-house team, you can start by making a copy of ez-shop.php, modifying the product rendering part to make use your product_meta table, and then point your website to use the modified version instead of the original one.

I can help by providing the code that generates my own e-shop as an example. If you would like me to customize your shop front, get in touch with me through Support Portal.

Future Plans

I plan to make the customization process accessible to my end-users by providing a template where they can define how their e-shop and product information pages will look like. They will also have an interface where they can add and modify their product_meta table.

Buyer Experience

To help your buyer during the purchase process, the following help text is shown to them when they click on the titlebar (?) icon. Similarly, during the product delivery stage, your buyer is guided along using the following help screen.