Great Find To Automate Mals-e.com Webstores

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http://www.optioncart.com

It's free. It uses PHP/MySQL to dynamically create your store's webpages and it links directly into your mals-e.com storefront.

Makes building mals-e.com webstores 100 times easier.

Just found it and so far I'm very impressed.

Thought I should pass it along.

Sean


:batman:

[Maurice]

This is really interesting and may encourage me to get into "e-commerce stuff" sooner than later. But there's something I don't quite understand in this case, namely, "What's the relationship (technically speaking) between Option-Cart Catalog and Mals-E?" I know that's a totally newbie question for me to ask, but the following quote from the homepage of the Open-Cart Catalog site has me confused.It's the easiest way to create an online ordering system. And best of all, it's completely free for individual stores who use or wish to use the free Mals-E shopping cart.Is Option-Cart a kind of plugin for Mals-E? I mean, Mals-E alone seems pretty straight forward, so what's the point of Option-Cart? Then again, I noticed references to .cfm in Mals-E, which I take to mean Cold Fusion, whereas Option-Cart is definitely PHP/MySQL... :confused:

Thanks for your insights. And please don't waste too much time explaining things to me, as it's not like I'm about to work on this tomorrow. :)

~Maurice

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The way Mal-e works is you add HTML FORM code for each item for sale to your webpages. When people click on the Buy Now form buttons, they're taken to a Mals-e server where a shopping cart is created and checkout is possible. Checkout details are stored securely on the Mals-e server or sent straight to a payment gateway.

However, hand-coding these Mals-e lnks gets very tedious if you have a lot of items.

Option Cart makes the whole process dynamic. You input your items and their details into a mySQL database, assigning them categories, photos, prices and descriptions.

When a visitor comes to your Option Cart store, the catalog.php file dynamically generates the store webpages, each with the proper links to your Mals-e server account.

No more hand-coding of sale items, that's a big plus. When you add that Option Cart is free, that's terrific.

Sean

[Maurice]

Thanks, Sean! Now I understand. Gosh: I wouldn't think of anything BUT a dynamic shopping cart! Hand-coding of links is simply NOT a viable option, even for a small online shop. If anything can be done with PHP/MySQL (which is virtually everything), I do it. :)
~Maurice :cheers:

[See Maurice make a note of this thread for later reference.]