Ecart From Scratch

Hi everyone,

I am brand new to making a pro website. I have just finished creating all my pages in dreamweaver and now all that's left for me is to create a shopping cart so the customers can purchase the 1 and only product of this company.

Here is the site... www.ayremount.net

So, I bought the Ecart extention to try and simply add a cart with a shipping and tax calculator. I want to be able to use paypal but paypal was too complicated to integrate calculating the shipping.

Here are my questions:

1. Is there an Ecart tutorial that explains how to make a simple cart from beginning to end?

2. Some of the videos don't work on the Ecart Videos page. For the last 3 videos, I just get an "Adobe Captivate" spinner that times out.

Anyways, all I want to do is add Fedex shipping and the different Canadian Provincial taxes to the cart. I'd like to learn how to do this. Is there anything available to guide me?

Thanks in advance
Andre

there is not one tutorial that covers from beginning to end, there are to many variables to creating a store.


the basics are:
1) Add the Add to cart buttons to the product pages

2) Create a cart display page

3) Run the checkout wizard to create the checkout pages.

while running the checkout wizard, you will be able to set up basic tax settings.

you can also select to use fed ex for shipping.


If you need to modify the tax or shipping settings after running the checkout wizard, you can edit the eCart object.

if there is something specific you need help, please let us know and web can offer direction.

OK thanks Jason. I've got this started. But I have a lot more questions....

order.php

1. I have two updatable fields (height and width) that I need included into the checkout form. When you enter text into these fields, they do not show up in the checkout display. What am I doing wrong?

2. If I make a mistake creating the ADD TO CART button in the wizard... is there a way to re-use the wizard to edit that button, or do I need to edit the code to make changes, or delete the code and start from scratch in the wizard again.

3. The wizard didn't give me many options for applying tax. How can I check if the final charges to the item will include all the different provincial taxes? (ie BC 12% vs Alberta 5%) If someone is buying this item from a different country, how do I know they won't be charged tax?

So close to making this website live and I would really appreciate the help just to get it going asap. Then afterwards, I would love to learn more about how to educate myself to make further changes to make life easier for the customers. Does anyone have any advice for education for learning how to figure this stuff out?

TY!

1) when adding the cart display manager to the page, go to the second step here you can select the cart columns to be included in the display, you can select to include the height and width columns.

if you prefer not to re run the cart display wizard, open the bindings panel, exapnad the cart object binding group, you can then add the bindings for the hieght and width columns to the display.

2) Go to the Server Behaviors panel, you will see a listing for the add to cart button server behavior, double click it to edit it.

3) Edit the eCart object, on the taxes tab you can define different tax rates. the shipping province will be stored in a session variable named:
eCartCheckoutForm_shipping_state_province

you can create a tax rule for each province using the triggers:

If session Variable exists:
eCartCheckoutForm_shipping_state_province

AND
Based on Session Variable value - if the session variable "eCartCheckoutForm_shipping_state_province" is "=" a value of "<province abbreviation>"

where <province abbreviation> is the abbreviation for the province.

for the calculation use:
Based on taxable total "times" "<tax rate>"

where <tax rate> is the tax percentage as a decimal number.

Hey Jason, thanks for your response... I've kinda figured out everything with your help. I'm just going through the process of figuring out how to test everything using Sandbox. I'll let you know how it turns out and thank you!

If I want to learn this stuff so I can make the eCart even better... do you recommend anything to help educate myself?

The tutorials on the eCart support page will help, and also ask questions here.

Hi Jason,

So I have set up everything the way I want for my eCart, but it gets as far as the shipping information page and when I enter the info, I get a shipping_failure.php page that says "shipping quote failed".

Let me go through the steps I chose for the checkout wizard...

- "Accept Credit Cards and Paypal"
- PayPal Website Payments Standard (sometimes it would crash my Dreamweaver... I could only get this to work a couple of times)
- Paypal member ID (I enter: Merchant account ID ex RJLRPUUGW4###)
- I enter my Shipping Account Info (Is the Security Key and Password, the same thing as the Production Key and Password? I couldn't find anything that said "security" in my Fedex information so I am assuming the Production Key is the same thing)
-I enter all the Shipping Info (Was never asked how much my box will weigh??? Where do I enter the weight?)

I have done this a few different times with a couple of different variables, but nothing to drastic in change. Do you know what the problem(s) could be?

order.php

Thanks in advance!

we need to know why the shipping quote failed.

on the bindings panel, there is a binding group for the shipping provider you selected, one of the bindings is full response.

add this binding to the failure page, this will show the response from the shipping quote, and should contain an error message with details on why the quote failed.

Hi Jason,

So I think I was able to do as you asked me... I found the full response binding in the bindings panel. I clicked the insert button and this came up in the content:

{eCart1.FedEx.FullResponse}

So now when I fill out the shipping info on my checkout page and fill out the shipping info I get this message:

Shipping Quote Failed
We're sorry
Authentication Failed

I'm pretty sure Authentication is a new response, but do you know what that means?

IT means that the information for connecting to the Fed Ex server that you entered is not correct and the fed ex server is not allowing you access.

NOTE: FEd Ex made some updates to their API Recently, We Have just released eCart 5.0.7 to address these changes.

you should uninstall eCart from the extension manager, then install the new update. in the WA_eCart folder delete the fed ex helper file, then edit the fed ex shipping server behavior on the confirm page to correct the settings and have the new fed ex file generated.