E-commerce overview

The first step in creating a shopping cart system is to design the interface. Typically, an online shopping system includes the following pages:

Products page Lets customers view information about available products and add them to a shopping cart.

Shopping cart page Displays the current contents of the customer's shopping cart and lets the customer change quantities, delete items, or continue shopping.

Check out page Lets customer enter the address, credit card number, and other information necessary for completing the order.

Order confirmation page Confirms that the order has been successful, and supplies any other information you want to tell the customer.

What you call these pages and how you design them is entirely up to you.

This section assumes you already know how to create dynamic placeholders, links to dynamic pages, dynamic tables, and set up forms.

The following sections give basic instructions on what needs to appear on the pages that make up your shopping cart area. You should create the pages first and then go back to create bindings, specify button actions, and so on. The rest of this section assumes you already have a database set up for use with your online store.

The e-commerce features of Microsoft Commerce Server and Adobe GoLive expect the database to have a very specific structure. The database must have a table called Products that includes the following fields:

The Products table can also include any other fields you need in addition to the required fields. In this case, you should have an ASP programmer familiar with Microsoft Commerce Server edit the mscommerce.asp files found in the Info and Include folders inside the Adobe GoLive Config folder on the server to incorporate the additional fields you want to use.

Explore the online store demonstration provided with Adobe GoLive to see how a shopping cart system should work. You can find it in the Dynamic Link\Examples\asp\adobe folder where you installed Adobe GoLive. To open it in your browser, make sure it is available on your Web server and enter its Web address. A typical address would be: http://localhost/golive/adobe/home.asp. If you have Microsoft Access, also explore the adobe.mdb database available in the Databases folder inside the Dynamic Link Config folder on your Web server.

Using Dynamic Link > Creating an e-commerce site > E-commerce overview