Hi Janine,

I am just trying to finish up the shopping cart portion of my very first e-commerce site. I have the entire site done –- with the exception of trying to integrate the product pages with the shopping cart. I remember from your Total Training lessons, where you discuss Robin Eschner’s site, you discuss using the “drop-down” menus for situations like this. Some of the products come in various sizes so I created drop-down menus for the sizes. I’ve also placed an image button titled “add to cart” in the same table ttcell as the little drop-down menu.

Here’s where I’m getting stuck… How do I set it up so that once the shopper selects a size from the menu and clicks the “add to cart” button, that item is added to the cart? (How does the “add to cart” button know which size they chose???) I’ve played around with the item labels and values but can’t figure out how to do it!!

Can you help?

Thanks Janine,
Randy

Hi Randy,

Creating a shopping cart is one of the most complex things you can do with Dreamweaver and there are so many ways to set one up that it would be impossible for me to diagnose your problem via email. How you create the functionality you want depends on many variables, including what technology you are using to create the interactive functionality (PHP, JSP, ASP, or something similar).

If you’re relatively new to Web design, my best advice to you is to use one of the existing shopping cart systems already out there.

Because shopping carts are so complex to create, most people (unless they work at a huge company such as Amazon or have VERY advanced programming skills) wouldn’t build their own shopping cart system. Instead, they’d use one of the many existing ones you can buy or rent from a variety of companies, including Amazon and Google.

Those systems generally work like this: You sign up with a company that has a shopping system, customize the pages on their system to look more like your site (some allow more customization than others), and upload your own images and enter your own text for your products or whatever you want to sell. Then when visitors to your site are buying things, they’ll be using this third-party system, usually without even realizing it. Of course you also enter your own banking and other information so that when someone does buy something, their money is automatically deposited in your account.

There are costs involved with most of these systems because they are so complex to build and maintain, but many of them include everything you need, even credit card processing. Usually you pay an initial set-up fee and then a monthly fee or a percentage of each transaction, or some combination of these.

I suggest you read through the descriptions on the Web sites of a few of these services to find the one that might best meet your needs. Here are a few to consider:
Google Store http://www.googlestore.com/
Webstore by Amazon http://webstore.amazon.com/Online-Store-FAQ/
Yahoo Store http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ecommerce/

There are also a number of systems you can buy and install on your own server, such as http://www.cartweaver.com/ and the eCart at http://www.webassist.com/, but these involve more work and the details can get complicated if you’re not a programmer.

I hope that helps you find the right solution and I wish you all the best with your Web site,

Janine

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