Shopping cart

[bajabentley]

Hi all

I am trying to get the hang of the Xara software, and I am getting there, but i still have a few questions.

I am building a website for a clothing company I am starting - bomonos.com

I need to make a shopping cart. Xara makes adding the ebay cart simple as can be but it is not quite what I want. Is it possible to make a cart set up similar to this?
http://shop.johnnycupcakes.com/shop/
I like that is simple and easy.

thank you for any help in advance!

-Tyler

[pauland]

Hi Tyler,

Xara has no direct support for shopping carts besides using widgets/placeholders to include external solutions. Also you will find that if included in this manner that the cart area will be confined to a fixed area and will not allow page sizes that expand or contract to fit dynamic store content. Some people use links to external store solutions.

Nice bold website design, BTW. Width is larger than many peoples monitor size, so they won't be able to see it all without horizontal scrolling and will always be seeing a horizontal scrollbar.

Paul

[bajabentley]

Thank you for the comments!

so, What software are companies using to make shopping carts? is it all done in dreamweaver from scratch? the learning curve on that program sure is steep!

-Tyler

[BOB WISE]

Tyler, There is a widget from a company called Ecwid. Xara has instructions at: http://www.xara.com/us/widgets/v7/e-commerce
I have been playing with it and it seems like a good possibility.

Let us know if you get it working.

Good Luck, Bob Wise

[bajabentley]

Looks interesting, I'll work on it and keep you posted

-Tyler

[BOB WISE]

Tyler, I have a shadow site hosted on the Magix servers which I use to test out new stuff. http://wise.magix.net/public/index.htm
Click on the shop button -- I have added the Ecwid widget and started to modify it.
My regular site is http://www.wisesurfboards.com/

Bob

[pauland]

What software are companies using to make shopping carts? is it all done in dreamweaver from scratch?

Depends on the company, but generally yes, by coding html and CSS either from scratch, modifying a template, or by customising a pre-prepared template or choosing from a library of templates.

[jyoung]

coffeecup.com has cart creation capability.

[slavelle]

Just wanted to offer my two cents about Ecwid:

I tried it out for a while and found it to be REALLY useful. I mocked up a client site that I'm still waiting on an answer for - but it worked really well for electronic downloads - physical ones would be fine I'm sure as well.

It's pretty flixible as long as you are comfortable with getting your hands into the CSS. If you happen to like the (rather large) default look or one of the minor variations included, you'll be good to go out of the box and can literally have a functional store in a matter of however long it takes you to punch in all of your products, upload pics, etc.

Working it inside a Xara site can be a bit of a challenge, however because this thing uses as lot of AJAX calls and in a lot of cases it needs to expand the vertical size of the space it's in, it can cause some issues. Best bet it to make the placeholder as big as you think the cart will ever need to get (there's paging and such). iframes might also be an option.

In my case, I was building it into a Joomla! site, and I definitely had some interesting issues trying to show a sample of the cart in Xara, so I wound up doing it all in Joomla, even for the mockup. At any rate - it's certainly worth a try for the FREE that it is for a normal account. If you need some of the extra features, you can sign up for the $17/month account later, but for trying out the features and probably running a moderate store, you can do it on the free account.

Hope that helps.

[jparker587]

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