Shopping Carts Quick Start Guide - cPanel

Activating your shopping cart:
Your Linux account type, if eligible, comes with several free interactive shopping cart systems, among them

OS Commerce
and
Agora

Both are open-source scripts.  Both offer automated shopping page and item creation utilities.  Agora is geered more toward people who know Html and Perl, while OScommerce requires virtual no HTML manipulation to maintain and is based on a point and create system.  From experience we recommend OScommerce to all users as it is simply the better system.

These shopping cart systems may be automatically installed from your cPanel control panel.  Agora has its own icon which you may click on.  OS Commerce is located in the ADD ON SCRIPTS or FANTASTICO icon.  Please note that any shopping cart files or bandwidth count against your account quota. 

We have presented you with some starter documentation below.  However, for full documentation and support you should visit the Agora or OS Commerce websites (links at the bottom of each section).

OS Commerce Quick Start Guide (view demo)

To automatically install your OScommerce shopping cart system click on the ADD ON SCRIPTS or FANTASTICO icon in your account control panel.  Then click on OScommerce. Select a username and password for cart management and a directory to install into.

For the sake of this example, we enter a directory name of cart. Please note that you must have MySQL access installed into your account and you must have at least one free database in your account for OS Commerce to work.   If you know have a free database and setup fails try deleting the cart and installing it again.  Sometimes the installation routine needs to be run more than once.

Instantly your cart will be setup.  It can be viewed on the web at http://yourdomain.com/cart

Logging on to the admin area: Your cart will be placed into directory ""cart"" (or whatever directory you assigned it o) off of your main HTML directory.  For instance, if your domain name is rabbit.com then your cart's admin page will be located at the http://rabbit.com/cart/admin.  Go there on the web and you will see an administrative logon link.  Logon and you will see a menu like the image below.

Configuration Page: The first thing you want to do is visit the configuration page (shown below) where you can name your cart, tell the cart what email to send data to (important) and setup some of the basic cart options.  After this you may want to visit the Locations and Localization sections where you can define taxes and shipping defaults. The cart is very powerful so you should go through the sections a little and experiment.

Catalog Pages and Item Creation: Usuing the catalog link will bring you to the area where items and pages can be defined.  You can even group items, assign specials, edit reviews, etc.  These groups and items are all added automatically to the main menu of the cart.  You can also upload item images here.


Payment systems: OScommerce supports most every popular payment systems including Authorize.net, paypal, credit cards, etc.  Support for most can be installed in one click.  Click on MODULES -> PAYMENT to choose which merchant interface to install.  If your interface is not listed by default, it usually can be installed by inserting a module into OScommerce which many internet webmasters have already created.  The OScommerce website maintains a list of these modules for easy access.

Customers and order tracking: Each customer that orders from you creates an account for himself.  Clicking on the customers icon will show you records of each customer along with any order he/she placed.  Orders will also be auto-sent to your email address.

Altering the index page: You can alter the appearance and text of your cart index page by going to TOOLS -< FILE MANAGER.  Then click on index.php and then on edit.  You can also edit this file directly through ftp, etc.

Making Backups and Advanced Tools: The Tools section holds some pretty powerful features inside.  Among the most important is the "backup" tool which allows you to backup your cart in the event your cart is corrupted or you edit a file badly.  We suggest taking a backup often to save your hard work.   Also available are in page banner controls, file manager, customer control and even a newsletter system where you can email all available registered users of your shopping site.

More OS Commerce Documentation:

OS Commerce is an open-source shopping cart.  This means that it is free to use, and always developing and evolving (just like Linux).  As such, you can find tons of support and docs from the OS Commerce website.  This includes:

Agora Shopping Cart Quick Start Guide (view demos)

Unlike OS Commerce, Agora gives you a choice of what directory you want to put your shopping cart in.  The cart directory can be any directory directly over your main directory.  For instance, http://dialzip.net/agora is valid but something higher like http://dialzip.net/mycart/agora is not valid.

In cPanel, click on Agora.  Then install your cart by specifying your administrative username and password and your desired cart directory.  Make sure to only use numbers and letters and to write it down.  Your cart will now be automatically installed.

Logging On: If you return to the Agora link in cPanel you will see two new fields: Modify cart and Remove cart.  Click on modify cart to enter your administration screen or Remove cart to destroy your cart.  Note that you may need to enter your cart username and password twice because cPanel needs to switch from its control system to the Agora control system.  Also you need to have Cookies enabled in your browser for the admin screens to work properly.

Where is your cart? The installation will automatically load a demo which you can alter to fit your needs.  This demo (which is your shopping cart) can be accessed by customers by going to http://yourdomain/cartdirector/agora.cgi.  So if your domain is rabbit.net and you installed your cart in the agora directory, then customers should visit you at http://www.rabbit.net/agora/agora.cgi.

Main settings: Click on the programs settings tab to setup custom settings such as the email address orders are sent to, your tax and shipping amounts, payment gateway instructions, how many products appear on each cart page, where your logs will be written to and so on.


Administration and Page Creation: Agora is an open source system and more of a shopping cart script then a turn key shopping cart.  So it is built with the Perl and HTML programmer in mind.  As such you should be prepared to get your hands wet in HTML code.  With a little manipulation you should be able to easily build pages such as the one above for your users to utilize.

More Agora Documentation and Support:

Agora is an open-source shopping cart.  This means that it is free to use, and always developing and evolving (just like Linux).  As such, you can find tons of support and docs from the Official Agora website (go here, not to the link mentioned in the cart).  This includes: Please note that we do not provide technical support in any way for Agora beyond its initial installation.  Make sure to use the Official Agora website for your customer support base.