Title: ezwebstore.cgi Version: 3.01 Release: 12.23.2000 ezwebstore.cgi is distributed according to the GNU General Public License. NO WARRANTY BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION. No free support is offered for this product. There is a CGI installation FAQ at: http://www.ezwebstore.com/install-faq.html And a forum at: http://merchant-store-forums.merchant-pay.com/cgi-bin/discussions/Ultimate.cgi Paid Installation and Support are offered by us at Merchant-Store.com. Contact us at: Merchant-Store.com sales@merchant-store.com (361)654-1481 ################################################################ ****** Installation ################################################################ Installation requires three files 1) readme.txt (this file) 2) ezwebstore3_01.tar - the unix tar file containing all of the ezwebstore.cgi files 3) install.txt - a simple cgi program that will untar ezwebstore.tar ================================================================ **Step 1 - Upload (via ftp) ezwebstore.tar to your cgi-bin directory. Make absolutely sure that you ftp this file as a BINARY file!! **Step 2 - Rename install.txt to install.pl and upload (via ftp) this file to your cgi-bin directory. Make absolutely sure that you upload this as an ASCII file!! WARNING - Failure to transfer these files in the correct mode (ASCII or BINARY) is one of the most common causes of problems - TAKE YOUR TIME AND DO IT RIGHT :-) **Step 3 - Change the permissions on the file 'install.pl' to 755. If you're unsure how to do this, take a few minutes to go through this excellent tutorial: http://www.mattkruse.com/info/cgi/ Now you're ready to untar (decompress) the ezwebstore.tar file. (Be aware that doing this will create a directory called /store within the cgi-bin. If you already have a directory called /store in the cgi-bin, it will be overwritten) **Step 4 - Call install.pl using your web browser. The URL should be: http://www.your_domain.com/cgi-bin/install.pl Hopefully you should see this message: "Excellent! It appears that you have successfully installed ezwebstore.cgi!" If you receive an error when you access install.pl, check the permissions on the file, and make sure that you uploaded the file in ASCII mode. !!IMPORTANT!! Once the ezwebstore.tar file has been successfully decompressed, it is VERY important that you IMMEDIATELY DELETE install.pl. Why is this important? Only because if you accidentally run it again in the future, you could overwrite all of the great changes you've made to your store. DELETE THIS FILE NOW! ################################################################ **Before Doing Anything Else** The file 'ezwebstore.cgi' is located in the /store directory The file 'manager.cgi' is located in the /store/protected directory Make sure that the first line of manager.cgi and ezwebstore.cgi contain the correct path to perl on your system. This line should look something like: #!/usr/bin/perl -T or #!/usr/local/bin/perl -T It is *very* important that you use perl version 5. Some systems have both version 4 and version 5 installed in different locations for backwards compatibilty. The scripts may appear to run with perl 4, but you will encounter weird errors along the way. If you're unsure, ask your Systems Administrator for the correct path. ################################################################ ****** Store Manager ################################################################ ****** Accessing the Store Manager Next, to get the store up and running, you will need to access the Store Manager. Call the manager.cgi file in your browser using the following syntax exactly: http://www.your_domain.com/cgi-bin/store/protected/manager.cgi?welcome_screen=yes Username: admin Password: admin Obviously, you need to change this to reflect your specific URL and path. If you leave off the '?welcome_screen=yes' part of the URL, a blank page will be returned, so make sure to use the correct URL to access Store Manager. ****** Password Settings Login to Store Manager and select the 'Edit Username and Password' link in the page body. You should choose your own username and password to access your Store Management System. ****** Store Settings Login to Store Manager and select the 'Store Settings' link at the top. The 'Store Settings' screen allows you to easily set certain configuration variables for your store. We'll go through each of these choices one by one... 1) 'Please enter the color code # for the look and feel of your site. You can click the link provided to view color code numbers. 2) 'Please enter the layout number for your products display.' You can click the link to view layouts. 3) 'Please enter the full URL of your /images directory. For example: http://www.ezwebstore.com/cgi-bin/store/html/images DO NOT include the trailing slash!!' Now, if you find that you cannot serve images from your /cgi-bin directory, you can simply create an images directory somewhere else on your server and enter the URL to that directory here. Just as it says, DO NOT include the trailing slash in the URL! 4) 'Please enter the full URL of your store here: (ex: http://www.ezwebstore.com/cgi-bin/store/ezwebstore.cgi) One important note: Cookies are very particular and need to be set carefully. Specifically, take a look at these two URLs http://www.ezwebstore.com/cgi-bin/store/ezwebstore.cgi http://ezwebstore.com/cgi-bin/store/ezwebstore.cgi If you drop the 'www' from your URL in this setting, and then try and access your Store using the 'www' in the URL, you'll find that the cookie won't be set. Similarly, if you include the 'www' in this setting, but access the Store without using the 'www' in the URL, the cookie won't be set. Just be consistent with how you use your URL and you shouldn't have any problems. If you're worried that visitors to your Store may drop the 'www' on their own, just make sure that all the links on your frontpage include the 'www' and then the cookie will be set when they click through.... 5) 'Customers from the state selected here will be charged sales tax' This is self explanatory. Orders that are SHIPPED to this state will be charged sales tax. 6) 'Enter sales tax percentage here. Enter as a decimal number. Ex: ".05" for "5%", ".06" for "6%", etc.' Orders that are shipped to the state selcted above will have this percentage added to the order for sales tax. 7) 'Do you wish to have orders e-mailed to you?' Answer 'yes' to this... 8) 'Enter the e-mail address where you'd like the orders sent' Self explanatory - just make sure that it's an address that is reliable. 9) 'Do you wish to have the orders written to a log file?' Answer yes to this too... 10) 'Choose a unique name for your log file. (ex: "mylog3218.txt")' This is *very* important. Make up an odd name that only you will remember...use letters and numbers. This file will contain your order data and will be located in the /cgi-bin/store/log_files directory. 11)'Enter the e-mail address of your webmaster or administrator here' ****** Gateway Settings Login to Store Manager and select the 'Gateway Settings' link at the top. 1) 'Gateway Username' Enter your valid gateway username. Note: You can get a free "Test Gateway ID" from us at: http://www.merchant-store.com/test_account_body.html When you need a live "Gateway Account ID #" contact us at: sales@merchant-store.com or call (361) 654-1481 2) 'Enter the name of your business here.' Self explanatory 3) 'Are you setup to accept EFT through your gateway? Select '0' for no, '1' for yes.' Self explanatory 7) 'Do you want to allow customers to enter an alternate shipping address? Select '0' for no, '1' for yes.' If you answer yes to this, the orderform will allow customers to enter a shipping address that is different from the billing address. Depending on your business, you may or may not want to allow this... 8) 'Enter the text that you'd like to appear in the body of the confirmation e-mail sent to the customer.' This is the e-mail that is sent to the customer by the gateway after the order is processed. ****** Edit Pages Login to Store Manager and select the 'Edit Pages' link at the top. Here you need to choose which page to edit. Options are: aboutus.html customerservice.html refundpolicy.html contactus.html After you click "EDIT" for the appropriate page you will see a form that allows you to edit the text that is displayed to your customers on that page. You can use HTML but be careful - Netscape will not display broken if your code is not perfect. ****** Edit Categories Login to Store Manager and select the 'Edit Categories' link at the top. To edit the name of an existing category, click "EDIT" and change the name. To delete an existing category name, click "EDIT" and delete the name. To add a new category, click "EDIT" on a category with no name, then enter the name you would like to display for this category. The categories and links will automatically be displayed throughout your online store. ****** Adding Products to the Catalog Login to Store Manager and select the 'Add Products' link at the top. There is no set limit to the amount of products that can be maintained by Store Manager (or used by ezwebstore.cgi). The System has been tested with over 5000 products in one catalog. Nothing is programmed into manager.cgi or ezwebstore.cgi to limit the amount of products, but you may see server performance problems if your datafile becomes too big....just be careful and consider yourselves warned :-) 1) Reference # - This value is entered automatically by Store Manager. This is simply a unique number needed by ezwebstore.cgi to identify this particular product 2) Category - This should be one word only, no spaces 3) Price - just the numeric price, no $ sign needed 4) Product Name - two or three words to identify the product. This value is displayed in the shopping cart. 5) Image File - This is just the name of the image file, not the complete URL or path! If you've correctly set the 'URL To Images' field in the Program Settings screen, you this image should display correctly on your ezwebstore.cgi product pages. 6) Option File - the filename of your options file NOT the complete URL or path. The options files are located in the /store/html/options directory. Check out the sample file called gift_option.html for reference. 7) Shipping Price - This should be set to your base shipping price for each product. See the 'Shipping' Price section of this Read Me for more complete details. 8) Special Buys - if you enter the word * Special * this product will show up in the special Buys" section of the cart pages. 9) User Defined Field Two through Five - these five fields allow you to store up to four pieces of data. This is for advanced users ONLY! Note: Code modification is needed to use these data fields. 10) Description - This is where you enter the description and information about the product. HTML can be included here as well.. ****** Editing Products in the Catalog Login to Store Manager and select the 'Edit Products' link at the top. Here you will select the product you wish to edit, and then you will be taked to a form similar to the Add Products form where you can make your changes. ****** Deleting Products in the Catalog Login to Store Manager and select the 'Delete Products' link at the top. Here you will select the product you wish to delete. Use this screen with care!! ################################################################ ****** Shipping Price ################################################################ As mentioned in the 'Adding Products To Your Datafile' section of this Read Me, every product has a fixed 'base shipping' price assigned in the datafile. To add some additional flexibilty, there is now a way to add in additional levels of 'upgrade' shipping. Choose the "gateway-orderform.html" in the store/html directory, download this file in ascii mode and open it up in your text editor. Look for this SELECT box: This is where you'll add your levels of upgraded shipping. Notice how the "VALUE=" statements contain pipe delimited data such as 5|U.P.S. Two Day - Upgrade The '5' indicates 5% will be added to the base shipping price defined in the datafile. The 'U.P.S. Two Day - Upgrade' is the method of shipping that will be recorded with the order. ################################################################ ****** Going Live with your Online Store ################################################################ How to go "Live" with your Online Store. To accept credit cards and/or EFT (Electronic Checks) real-time online, you need an Internet Merchant Account and a transaction gateway service that takes the place of a credit card swipe machine in retail businesses. Contact us to submit your Merchant Account Application and setup your Live Gateway Account to accept credit cards and EFT real-time online. email: sales@merchant-store.com visit: http://www.merchant-store.com call: (361) 654-1481 Thanks for using our shopping system and Happy Selling!