How We Built Our Shop

Our first decision, which ecommerce software to use, was easy: ShopSite. We didn't choose it just because we sell it, either. With it we can sell our products online securely, have lots of leeway to set up whatever shipping options we choose, and track sales and inventory—all from an easy Web-based interface. Here at Cruzio, we "drink our own champagne."

ShopSite makes it really easy to configure your product names, descriptions, prices, ordering options, and so on. We configured our store to accept Visa and MasterCard payments (ShopSite also lets you accept payments via PayPal), configured taxes according to current rates, and set our shipping options.

We knew we wanted to use ShopSite for our shopping cart. To create the Shop's product pages, we had three methods to choose from. We could use ShopSite's built-in templates and let ShopSite create the product pages automatically, or we could design our own custom templates using ShopSite's easy-to-learn templating language.

We chose instead to use a wonderful feature called Order Anywhere which allows you to link your products from any Web page to your ShopSite cart. This means you can use any Web editor you want to create the rest of your store. This method worked beautifully for us since we only had a few products and preferred to build our pages using DreamWeaver, an editor we know very well.

We wanted our new Shop to look good and be easy to use. To stay consistent with the look and feel of Cruzio's online Signup, we used the same stylesheet to duplicate the fonts, colors and other styles, and then added an additional stylesheet with some new styles. We reused many of the files and images from the online Signup as well, reducing our future maintenance work considerably. Laziness can be a virtue, when harnessed intelligently.

If your store visitors don't like or understand your homepage, they won't bother to look further. Our Shop's homepage needed to catch our visitor's eye and show them quickly where they are and what the Shop is all about. A Cruzio staff member took a photo of Cruzio's Santa Cruz storefront. We used the photo in the main area of the homepage, added some welcoming words, and generally spiffed up the page to look nice.

We made a list of the products we wanted to sell and categorized them. To make it easy to find items in the Shop, we kept the categories as simple as possible. Using DreamWeaver, we created a page for each category, added a Contact page and this how-to page. Then we snapped photos of our products with a digital camera and easily uploaded them to the store.

We then added an Order Anywhere link to each product in the Shop that lets the shopper add the item to their cart with one click.

To make the shopping experience consistent from beginning to end, we made the Cart and Checkout pages match the other Shop pages as much as possible. ShopSite lets you insert your own text into the top and bottom of the Shopping Cart and Checkout pages. Here's a great ShopSite tip: if you know HTML, you can insert HTML code instead of text. This allowed us to include the logo, the tabbed menu, and the footer on the Shopping Cart page.

ShopSite also allowed us to configure several other Cart and Checkout page options, including the colors and buttons.

We receive an email message whenever someone orders a product from our Shop. A designated Cruzio staffperson accesses the order through ShopSite's secure back end, processes the payment, packages up the purchase, and sends it on its way to our shopper. It doesn't get easier than this—unless we start getting lots of orders and decide to set up automatic payment processing as well. ShopSite integrates with many types of online payment gateways.

Thanks for reading the story of our Shop. We hope we've demystified ShopSite and that you can see how easy it can be to set up an online store. Please feel free to read more about ShopSite or get a demo store. If you'd like to build your own store now, go ahead and sign up. If you have more questions, you can contact Cruzio staff. We're always glad to hear from you!