Obit Flower Purchases Through FCC Websites
This system utilizes both the htool and marketplace tools available in the CMS of all FCC newspaper websites. That marketplace listing is used as the landing page that you will link people too from your obits. Then each arrangement that you will be providing will need its own htool page as well. There are two main reasons for each product having its own htool page. 1) This will allow you to display a large, high resolution image of each arrangement and 2) the length of the single marketplace with ordering included gets to be a bit complicated, both in appearance and back end code.
The following pages will give you an overview of setting up the marketplace page, setting up the htool pages, and also setting up the shopping cart (we are using Roman Cart in Duluth). The last thing to do is setting up a PayPal account for your property and upgrading it to PayPal Pro. This will allow you to process payments inside of your shopping carts secure server instead of passing people along to the PayPal website which we found was causing problems in IE6.
The Marketplace Listing
We started with a normal enhanced marketplace listing for Engwalls Florist which included some basic information on the company so that people can see that they are ordering from a reputable local business in our community. However since we do want people to complete their order through our site we setup an anchor tag in the page so that when they arrive the first thing they see are the different arrangement options. Also we decided to not include the link to their website or phone number that would appear on a normal marketplace.
After you have built a simple listing for the florist that will be fulfilling your order the next step will be to display images of each selection. Each of these images should also be a link to that individual products htool page. The easiest way to accomplish this is to build a table with each picture in its own individual cell. Also since this means having thumbnails we included a JavaScript that enlarges the picture when you mouse over it (I would recommend keeping the original image to a width of approximately 300px so that the enlarged image doesn’t expand off the page).
This link will show you the code for Engwalls marketplace listing. You can copy this into your sites marketplace and with only a few changes have it up and running for your local provider. Htool Product Description/Order Pages
As I talked about before you will need to setup an htool page for each of the arrangements that you will be selling. These URLs are where you need to point the pictures from your marketplace. The setup for these pages is relatively easy. The top portion of the page is broken into two side, the left with the large product image and description and the right side contains the shopping cart buttons. Below this information I setup and additional table which contains a small picture of each arrangement with link attached so that once you have navigated away from the marketplace listing you can still look at different arrangements (once this is completed, it can easily copy and paste it into each page).
The buttons for the shopping cart are small HTML forms. Our florist wanted to provide three different levels of each arrangement with different prices, so we created a drop down menu where the customer can choose their version of each arrangement and then add it to the cart. This code is also where you can pass and shipping charges for the item to the cart. The code for this is below.
There are two other links you will see on the htool pages we are using which go to one of two small pages which quickly explain either the difference between the different versions of the arrangements and also Engwalls substitution policy. Use this link to take a look at the entire code for an htool page. Again you could pretty much copy and paste this in, but there are a good number of site specific choices on this page so it might be best to create the first one of these from scratch and then copy and paste the rest of your pages.
Roman Cart Setup
After trying several different solutions we realized that we needed a shopping cart to make this work the best way possible. After doing some searching around Roman Cart seemed like it was the best option based on functionality, ease of setup and also price. That said if there is a shopping cart solution you would rather use there is no reason that won’t work, however the above code would no longer be accurate in that situation. Initial Setup: Roman Cart is extremely feature filled, however for the most part you won’t need to take advantage of the vast majority of those options. The screen below is what you will see after you have first logged into the site. For the setup of your cart you will be using the “Configure the cart” button. You will also be using the sales manager button to report on what you have sold, which I will cover in greater depth later.
On the following screen you will be able to setup the shipping, tax, additional fields you may need in your shopping cart, payment options and other cart specifics. Shipping: We found that shipping will work best when it is sent from button on the page to the cart. Also you need to setup shipping so that tax is applied to the shipping charge.
Tax: Tax setup is very simple. You can have it included in your price, however there is now breakdown when it hits the cart so I don’t recommend doing it that way. Simply set your local rate and save. Set show tax to yes, but don’t worry about the “advanced tax options”. Extra Checkout Fields: This will vary from property to property and also what information your local florist wants provided to them. In Duluth we require Name of the Deceased, and Card Message and Signature, and also provide space for Special Delivery Instructions and also Requests for the Arrangement.
Payment Options: In this area you can select any payment options that you would like. We are currently only using PayPal Pro as our payment solution. By using the pro version of PayPal we are able to process our payments directly inside of our shopping cart (Credit Cards, Electronic Checks, and also people may use their own PayPal accounts). There are several other options to explore if for some reason PayPal doesn’t meet your needs.
Configure Other Options: The section of the cart to setup is entitled “Configure other options”. In here you will setup the inner workings of the cart. You will also be able to customize several of the screens in this location, for example placing logos on your basket or checkout screens or and custom verbiage that you would like to include on the confirmation email. Things to note on each of the above tabs
General Tab: Make sure you are set the currency, language, time zone.
Basket Tab: Set the URL for the continue shopping button (in our case back to the marketplace listing).
Checkout Tab: SSL settings, and also the URL to redirect too after checkout is complete (obits page in Duluth)
Email Tab: Email address you want order confirmation sent too (florist, someone at your property) the address you want to appear as though its coming from, the email address you want as the reply to address for confirmation emails. In Duluth we had an email group created [email protected] (for orders confirmation emails and also to use as the reply to address) so that several of us could be involved in the email chain. However the address you want your confirmation emails sent too can’t be the same as the reply to address in the emails, so we came up with an easy work around. We created a dummy email address for our confirmation emails (in this case the gmail address below) and then included the actual email address in the cc: field below that. In this way we are able to receive the orders to [email protected] and also use it for the reply too address.
This is also the screen where you can include any special messages in the confirmation email. Marketing, Region and Shipping tabs: You won’t need to use.
Customize tab: You can use the options on this tab to customize the look of your cart. This includes the colors of the pages, and special messages or instructions on your carts pages and also the ability to include logos on your pages as well.
Sales Manager: Finally back to the sales manager that I mentioned earlier. From the first screen of the admin panel of the Shopping Cart you can enter the sales manager. In here you can see all of the sales, any orders that weren’t completed (the only situation we have seen was either incorrect billing addresses being entered which is a testament to PayPal, or denied credit cards) and print invoices if you want (same content as the confirmation emails). You can also download the sales data from a specific date range into a .csv file for Excel. This includes the order number, net and gross sale total, tax amount, and PayPal fee (transaction and credit card fee combined).