Page Comparison

Overview

This section explains how to use the buy links that appear on the confirmation page. To help illustrate it, a random site is displayed below. I chose Petsmart. Why? I worked there as a teenager, and I have a thing for animals. But, you'll see the same layout for every major store: Staples, Office Max, Office Depot, even Amazon. They all have the same layout. At the top right of the page is a cart icon/link. Clicking that link will display the current contents of a visitor's shopping cart. This is the View Cart LinkFor this we will use the site "http://www.austincakeball.com/". They have a great site and it is perfect for what we are trying to explain.

Each item displayed on the page contains either a link to a product description page, or an "add to cart" link. The "Buy Links" are your add to cart links. Scroll down below the image to see some sample code. Image Removed

In this picture below you will see the site is using two options to direct the customer to the "Order" page.

Image Added

Sample Code

So what if Petsmart decided they wanted to use UltraCart as a back end? Not a bad ideaSample View Cart button. To start, they'd need to change their view cart link. Here's their current view cart link (I just did a 'view source' on their web page):

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The code is pretty clean. It seems that that /cart/index.jsp is  is their view cart page. Okay, let's change that to point to UltraCart. For this example, I'm going to assign Petsmart a Merchant ID of PSMART. Since PSMART is six characters (max allowed is 5), I know no one is already using it. Here's their new View Cart, now pointing to UltraCart.

<div id="cartArea">
     <a href="https://secure.ultracart.com/cgi-bin/UCEditor?MerchantID=PSMARTDemo" 
        title="Cart" id="cart-label" 
        class="cartLabel">VIEW CART</a> 
     <a href="https://secure.ultracart.com/cgi-bin/UCEditor?MerchantID=PSMARTDemo" 
        title="Cart" 
        id="cart-label" class="cartContents"></a>
</div>

What about buy links? For that, let's dive down into the site a little, and click on an individual item. I chose a dog toy. We have a lot of dogs in the company. However, if I were to buy such a toy, it'd be for Jonathan's Boston Terriers, and NOT for RJ's Great Dane... I'm just saying. So Classic Cake Balls.  So you'll see below an an ADD TO CART link link. Let's change that.  Image Removed

Image Added

<span id="addCart">
    <a id="addToCart" href="javascript:theForm.addToCart();" >
        <img src="http://pet.imageg.net/images/btn_addToCart.gif" width="160" height="44" alt="Add To Cart" border="0" />
    </a>
</span>

Petsmart is calling Other sites may be using some javascript. That's cool. But it's even simplier simpler with UltraCart. I'll just replace their href with our buylinkbuy link, and we're done.

<span id="addCart">
    <a id="addToCart" href="https://secure.ultracart.com/cgi-bin/UCEditor?MerchantID=PSMART&ADD=BouncyBall" >
        <img src="http://pet.imageg.net/images/btn_addToCart.gif" width="160" height="44" alt="Add To Cart" border="0" />
    </a>
</span>

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