The system makes no assumptions about the structure of your product catalog.

In fact, the system allows you to construct your catalog pages using the normal Forms and Queries used for general data handling, and allows you to interface these structures to a pre-defined shopping cart and payment interface system.

This gives you the greatest possible flexibility in constructing an ecommerce site, and also makes it possible to add on ecommerce functionality to a site which started off as a simple brochure-ware site.

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How To

The 'How To' boxes in this section guide you through the essentials of getting an ecommerce system working. We recommend you follow these first, to get a functioning system, and then go back and add in extra functions (eg stock control, discounts etc) afterwards.

1. Add a Shopping Cart component to the site. (We will configure it later, but it needs to be added first, as we will reference it shortly elsewhere in the site.)
2. Create a Form which will contain your Product information

In this Form, ensure you have, as a minimum, the following fields:

• Name (Text)
• Description (Text, or Large Text)
• Product SKU (Text)
• Price (Currency)
• Item Type (Item Type) - note, you need to link this to the Shopping Cart component you created earlier

The actual names of the fields are not important - at this stage you simply need to ensure there are separate fields for each purpose, and they are of the right datatype.

You can add as many extra fields as you like to be used to display information, but the above is the minimum required for the ecommerce aspect.

You should enter a few example products, so that you can see them in the system. Otherwise, configuring the rest of the ecommerce system will be difficult as you won't be able to monitor your progress.