To begin the program, we'll go to the web address of the Max Shop Cart system on your website. This will almost always be in the form of:

You will also find this statement:

"Important Note: It is essential that you do NOT use the BACK button on your browser in the following pages. If you do, you will probably see a message that says "Warning: Page has Expired." This will not happen as long as you use the buttons provided. Thus, there's really no need to use the BACK button. "

Hopefully, that is self-explanatory. All the buttons you need are included on the webpages. Please do NOT use the BACK (or FORWARD) buttons on your browser. This caveat is necessary because the system can lose data unless you use the navigation buttons provided on the Max Shop Cart pages.

(Technical note: Actually, it won’t lose data, but it can appear that way because of warning messages that may appear if you use the BACK button on your browser.)

After entering your userid and password, you come to the "Control Panel" of the Max Shop Cart system. This is the main operating page. The first time you come here, you’ll want to use the Add a Product button. So let’s not look at the other elements of this page just yet. Just hit the Add a Product button.

Entering Products

When you do, you’ll see a page that asks for:

• Product ID
• Product Name
• Product Price
• Shipping Cost and addnt'l shipping cost
• Product Type
• Product URL (if downloadable)
• Product Size (if downloadable)

Let’s go over these.

Product ID is a label or number that you assign to the product. It is used on the Add to Cart buttons to identify the product. See the Add to Cart HTML setup.

Product Name is the name of the product. This will appear in the shopping cart as the item name of the purchased item.

Product Price is the price without a currency symbol (like $)  Example:  5.95

Shipping Cost and addnt'l shipping cost.  This is only used if you want the shipping charge for this particular product to be differernt than the overall Shipping Charge Configuration. (See Configuration page.)  The first field is the shipping charge if only one item is purchased, and the second part is the additional shipping charge per item, if more than one unit is being purchased.

Product Type is a pull-down field. It's either the word Download (D) or the words Must Be Shipped. It's used to differentiate a "physical" (P) product from a downloaded product.

Product URL (if downloadable) is the web address of where you have the downloadable item for sale. And Product Size (if downloadable) is the size of the download. (Example: 128K.  Or 3.2MB)

And that’s it. Now just hit the Add Product button, and the product gets added to the database of products on your website. You next see a screen which shows you what you entered.

List of Products You've Added

At this point, you go back to the Products Control Panel. And what do you see? You see your new product in the list of products. Only one is there, if this is the first product you’ve entered, but the list will expand as you add more products.

Let’s look at this list:

It shows you the Product Number (actually, the product ID), Product Type, Product Name and Amount. When you click on the word View on the same line as the Product Number, it shows you all the information about that product. When you click on the word Modify on the same line as the Product Number, it takes you to a screen that looks just like the Add a Product screen. Here’s where you can make changes to the product, if you need to. You can also choose to Remove the product completely, if you wish. You would put a check mark in the Remove column, and then click the Delete Checked Products button at the bottom of the list. (It’s unlikely that you’ll want to do this, very often.)

Note that word Product Number at the very top of the list in the colored row can be clicked on. If you do so, it will show you the list sorted by Product Number. The same is true of the words Product Name and Amount. You can sort the list by Product Name or Amount.

Now suppose you have lots of products. Say you have 500 products. Or even more. You probably don’t want the whole list on one page. So the list is "page-inated." This means you only see a certain number at one time, say 30. You can hit the Next and Back words, in order to see more of the list. This number is configurable. You can set it to be whatever you like.

What about the other buttons on this page? You can find out more here:

Manage Discounts

Now, let’s look at the page for setting up an Add to Cart (or View Cart) button….