ASPDotNetStoreFront SWF Image Viewer Popup

SWF Image Viewer Demo (this is a live site, so if you order something, you will be charged!)

If you are using ASPDotNetStoreFront for your shopping cart, then you know how the popup image viewer looks and to me, it doesn’t look all that great. After working with ASPDNSF for some time, I am finally starting to ‘get it’ and I thought I would share some of my secrets for working with this shopping cart.

You’re going to need a little working knowledge of ASPDNSF to do this, so if you’re not comfortable doing this yourself, contact me and I can set this up for your site. The code provided below does work, but is not as complete as it could be… (I can’t give away all my secrets). If you need help setting this up and would like the complete package (including SWF viewer), I charge a flat rate of $250 to set this up and it comes with everything you’ll need, plus a few extra tweaks you’re not going to find in this guide.

First of all, you’re going to need a SWF for making a gallery page. I used Zoomify Design as it’s inexpensive, simple to use and works very well. Zoomify Design costs $29 and it’s worth every penny to me. I am going to assume you know how to use Zoomify and if you don’t, read the documentation. It’s pretty easy and once you get it set up, it’s easy to make the files for your call to a SWF popup image viewer.

Create a flash directory to store your files on your server. I created my flash folder inside the root of the website, but you can choose almost any location, as long as the folder is readable.

You’re going to need to have a custom product.xml package. You can just copy one of existing product.XML packages for your products. I used product.SimpleProduct.xml.config Be sure and give your XML a new name, I use product.Flash.xml.config

Edit the XML package and look for this line of code in your XML package. It will appear in several place and it’s best to edit them all.

<xsl:value-of select=”aspdnsf:LookupProductImage(ProductID, ImageFilenameOverride, SKU, ‘medium’, 0, $AltText)” disable-output-escaping=”yes” />

Comment out the code so it looks like:

<!–<xsl:value-of select=”aspdnsf:LookupProductImage(ProductID, ImageFilenameOverride, SKU, ‘medium’, 0, $AltText)” disable-output-escaping=”yes” />–>

It’s better to comment it out, in case you make a mistake, it will be easier to fix. Right below the code you just commented out, place this bit of code to call the SWF.

<a href=”flash/{ProductID}/viewer.htm” target=”_blank”><img src=”images/product/medium/{ProductID}.jpg” /><br /> <center>Multi Image Viewer</center></a>

The areas in red are the only changes you will need to make a change to the code to make it work. Change the href path to reflect the location of the folder and the name of the htm file that calls the swf within the product folder. The {ProductID} pulls the dynamic file name for each image so leave that in tact. This code can be modified to suit your needs. Now upload the product.XML file into your XML folder on your webserver.

Choose the item you want to use the SWF multi image viewer. Each product has a unique user ID number and that’s what you’re going to name the folder that contains the SWF viewer and image files. Process the images per the directions for Zoomify and upload the folder into the flash folder on the website. (eg: upload the folder 2345 to the /flash directory on your website.

Go to your edit product page and choose the XML package you created for the item and you’re done. Be sure and check out the new page to make sure it looks the way you want and everything is working. A few lines of code, a little preperation and you’ve turned your vanilla ASPDNSF image viewer into a powerful and dynamic image viewing system that’s going to increase sales and make your customers very happy.

Here is a working example on a live site.

If you would like to have me do this for you and give you the complete package, with everything ready to go, contact me and I will try and get back with you as soon as possible. Please leave a phone number and a good time to contact you.

While many shopping carts and online stores have made great leaps in making their carts search engine friendly, they all seem to have room for improvement. Many shopping carts require fairly substantial modification to optimize the product, category and topic pages for the shopping cart. Some shopping carts are much better than others and ASPdotNetStorefront is one of them.

Out of the box, ASPdotNetStorefront is geared to being a a great ecommerce online shopping cart. But where ASPDNSF excels far above the rest is in the ability and scope of search engine optimizing. The level and depth of control over meta tags and their ease of access with ASPDNSF is brilliant. The user can set the page title, keywords and description all from the web administrator page. There is no need to edit core shopping cart files or change your .htaccess files, these featureas are all built into the store front and accessed using only a browser. That makes customization much easier and more effective. Other online shopping carts also have this ability, but you’re usually stuck with a global keyword or description and even then, URL and title descriptions are usually less than perfect.

Every single page is ASPDNSF is customizable for title, keywords and description and it’s so easy to do. If you’ve been working with shopping carts, you know how rare these features can be. After years of working with various programs and applications, I can say, ASPDNSF has the best SEO abilities of any of the shopping carts I have used. No other cart even comes close to this cart when it comes to search engine optimization. You can achieve a similar level in many of the free carts, like Zen Cart and OSCommerce, but they all fall short on ease of use, level of control and the time it takes to edit that you can get with ASPDNSF.

Without proper marketing, your sales will always suffer. ASPDNSF makes search engine marketing as simple as it gets. Of all the features touted by the makers of this online shopping cart, search engine optimization is one of the features they’re under promoting. I know they built the cart around VISA PABP compliance and they designed the cart to easy for your customers to use, but their search engine optimization settings and configurations make it feel like the cart was made to be search engine compatible.

So, if you’re looking for a shopping cart with excellent search engine optimization potential, then you’re going to find your enlightnment with their shopping cart. You can even sign up for a free 30 day trial to play around with the cart and check out just how powerful and customizable a cart they have.

But with this power, comes great responsibility. You can have the best product and still lose to an inferior product with better marketing. It happens all the time (McDonalds, Budweiser, VHS, etc..) Choosing the right cart is an important, but choosing the right words or NOT choosing the wrong words are even more important. You need someone with search engine experience to get the best results from this shopping cart. You need someone that knows how to talk to search engines and turn your product pages into sales. You can set the meta keywords and description for every page, but without the right words, you’re going to miss the potential that this cart provides.

ASPDotNetStorefront is a lot to type out, so hereafter, I will refer to it as ASPDNSF, which is easier to type.

ASPDNSF is another great shopping cart. This cart is used by some big names and it’s used by them for a reason – the cart is great. Out of the box, this cart excels. It has the basics you would expect from an online shopping cart: payment gateways, shipping gateways and so much more. Image handling with ASPDNSF is really good and by far, the best out-of-the-box image management I’ve used. But all these features come at a price, which is currently $1295 for the ‘good’ version. If you want the source, which you will, add an additional $995. Want updates, that will cost another $299. Total price for the store, the source and 1 year of updates: $2,589.00 – yep. Wait, don’t make up your mind just yet, even though that seems like a lot of money, it’s not a bad deal when you consider what you’re getting.

ASPDotNetStoreFront – The Good

Image management in ASPDNSF is very simple and very robust. Simple and powerful isn’t something you’ll usually find with a shopping cart, but somehow, they manged to make it work. Not only does it work, it works miracles. All those nice mouse-over images you see in online stores are built into this cart. With some carts, you have to manually add in the image function for every item, which is very time consuming and requires a good deal of programming knowledge. And then there’s Zoomify, a fantastic flash image viewer that is a godsend for detailed imaging in shopping carts. It takes a little work to use with each product, but it’s all drag and drop and anyone can use it – no programmer needed.

Another one of the great things about ASPDNSF is PABP compliance. You’ll never appreciate how much this means until you get the subpoena. TJ-Max and Marshals are currently facing a multi million dollar lawsuit thanks to their site’s data being hacked. This storefront was built with security in mind and that’s something that can not be said of many store fronts. Security should be a major concern of all shopping carts, but sadly, it is not. ASPDNSF takes security seriously and is yet another reason they’re one of my favorite shopping carts.

Search engines LOVE ASPDNSF. You won’t find an easier to use search engine method than the one used in this cart. It’s so customizable and simple to use, it shames most other shopping carts. This is a huge positive when it comes to a storefront and something I can not stress enough as being mission critical. Search engine optimization is damned good with ASPDNSF.

Inventory control is nothing short of spectacular. A lot of carts don’t track inventory by size, color and whatever other variants you may have, but ASPDNSF does and it does it very well. It’s also easy to change, update and manage inventory if you have a brick and mortar store. There’s even a third party tool called T-Hub that will integrate the store with QuickBooks POS and that’s something you’re really going to need once the online orders start rolling in.

ASPDotNetStoreFront – The Not So Good

Product management with ASPDNSF isn’t the best out there, but it’s not the worst either. While adding products and variants are very easy to do, changing prices and availability are not easy. ZenCart and OSCommerce have a very nice indicator for IF a product is published, but this is not the case in ASPDNSF. You will have to manually check on an item’s published status, which can be very time consuming. However, adding variants (size, color, etc.) are much easier to accomplish in ASPDNSF than ZenCart or OSCommerce default installs.

Templates are going to require knowledge in XML and XLS to really get the look you want and even then, without the source code, you’re still going to be at the mercy of the default program. However, with the source, you can do almost anything your programmer can imagine. It’s really powerful, but the power comes at a price – ease of use.

Support for ASPDNSF isn’t the best. You get 30 day support with your purchase, but the support is limited to problems and built-in features. If you want something not in the feature list, you’re going to have to hire someone to make it happen. Their forum, while informative, lacks the user base of ZenCart and OSCommerce and so a lot of the features you may want aren’t addressed and as such, they don’t exist without hiring someone to make your features and that’s not cheap.

ASPDotNetStoreFront – The Ugly

$$$ it’s going to cost you a fairly substantial amount to get your site where you probably want it to be and that’s something you’re going to have to consider when looking for an online storefront. Without the source, your hands will be tied when it comes to really making your site ‘zing’.

Some features you expect from a storefront don’t exist in ASPDNSF, which is a shame. Being able to filter products is possible, but the method is clumsy and down right confusing to many customers. With the source, you can make your own filtering, but it will cost you more money in programmer fees. Product filtering is a feature many customers expect and you will lose customers from lack of product filtering.

Google Analytics suffer with ASPDNSF. On the feature list, you’ll find Google Analytics as a feature of ASPDNSF. I’ve found the opposite to be true. You can get almost all features to work, but not all. There’s a odd situation where you can use some of Analytic’s features, but not all of them. Depending on the method you use, you can get certain features to work. As it stands, I have every feature of analytics except site searches. I’ve been told this issue is going to be resolved, but I’ve yet to see as resolution to this issue.

Windows hosting. I’m a linux guy, so using a Windows-ISS based host wasn’t something I wanted. Windows hosting costs more than Linux/Apache and lacks some of the features I’ve become used to using. I know, this is a preference issue, but it’s a big change for me and my hosting style and needs.

ASPDotNetStoreFront – What it all means

ASPDNSF is still my favorite storefront, despite its few shortcomings. If you’re looking to sell a few products that don’t have size and color variations, ASPDNSF may not be the best choice for you. But if you’re serious about ecommerce and your shopping cart, ASPDNSF is a bargain. It handles variants, sizes and inventory as good, if not better than any other shopping cart I’ve used and that’s with a default install. You also get a nearly infinite amount of products to add and that something you’re not going to get from many shopping carts. SEO is a breeze with this cart and while there are a few minor issues with SEO, this cart is by far, the easiest to use with SEO.

The cost may be off putting to some, but it’s also a one-time expenditure. A lot of other carts charge per month or even per sale, which to me is ridiculous. In the long run, you’ll be happy with the money you spent on ASPDNSF. It’s going to cost at least the same amount, in programmer fees or time, to get ZenCart and other free carts to act like ASPDNSF.

In this series, I will try and broach some of the pros and cons of various shopping cart and various ecommerce solutions. We will begin with ZenCart.

Zen Cart is a really nice online shopping cart. Out of the box, it works. It’s basic, but it does work. There’s a beauty to its simplicity, thus Zen. Out of the box, you get basic image handling, easy to use and create templates and built in credit card processing gateways. You also have the ability to add a lot of features that would cost thousands extra for most pay shopping carts, but with Zen Cart, most every extension and contribution that add functionality to your cart are free. $0 is a very attractive price for a piece of such powerful software, but there’s a cost. ZenCart management is not for the faint of heart. ZenCart requires a fairly high level of knowledge to really have a good shopping cart.

ZenCart – The Good

One of the best things about Zen Cart is it’s free. Yep, free. Not only is it free, it’s also open source, which means, given enough knowledge, you can make the cart do anything you want it to do. Well, anything within reason or the ability of your programmer. And it’s not just the cart that is free, the source is also free for Zen Cart. Shopping carts source code can cost thousands of dollars, but Zen Cart is free. And when you really need to change a function of the site, the source is, well, the best source. Updates and upgrades are also free and that’s a big plus in the world of ecommerce.

Designing a shopping cart with ZenCart is fairly simple, if you can design a website. Zen Cart uses a great template system. It’s very easy to use and it makes updating the software a lot easier. I really like the hierarchical taxonomic structure of the template system. It takes a little getting used to and it’s not a WYSIWYG system, you still need to code, but it’s one of the easier template systems I’ve used. And let us not forget, ZenCart is free.

Zen Cart – The Not So Good

Product management with ZenCart is both a godsend and a nightmare. The godsend is keeping track of products that are published vs non-published items. Price adjusting and category management. Any system is going to take some time to learn, but Zen Cart provided a wealth of information about your products, all on one page and all easy to update and edit. In some aspects, it’s the best product management layout I’ve used. However, adding variants (size, color, etc..) to a product is archaic. ZenCart’s cousin, OSCommerce, has an add-in that addresses this issue, but not in Zen Cart. ZenCart 3 is scheduled to address this issue, but the schedule itself is 2 years old. There are a few contributions and add-ons that try and address this issue, but the method for adding variants to products falls far short of user friendly and is downright hostile at times.

ZenCart – The Ugly

The downside – you need a real programmer. And every upgrade is going to require some rather extensive work to keep the look, feel and functionality of your site. All the little bells and whistles are going to cost you in programmer fees or extensive amounts of your time. Your cart is going to need a lot of add-on, contributions and graphics to have a nice looking and highly functional site. Images handling is fairly poor, but there are add-ons to make image handling as good as most any other website, but again, you’ll need someone who knows PHP and SQL to get it functional and be able to update your site in the future.

Search engine optimization is going to take a lot of work with Zen Cart. The shopping cart isn’t exactly what you would call search engine friendly out of the box, but that can be fixed with an add-on. So there’s more money to the programmer.

ZenCart – What it all means

Depending on what you’re selling, Zen Cart may be the best solution for your shopping cart. It can handle an infinite amounts of products, but if you have a lot of variants (size, color, etc.), you’ll probably be happier with an easier to use administrator interface for stock and attributes than the one used by Zen Cart. If you’re selling products without variants ZenCart may be a great solution for your web site’s shopping cart.

coming up next… ASPDotNetStoreFront