Buy Now Links

Now we add the mandatory tags. they take the form of field name and value of the field name. Note that in an html link no quotes ( " ) are used within the html link with the exception of the beginning and the end. Doing so will cause the link to be invalid. That is, the browser will see the first " after the first " and assume that that is the end of the string and you will wind up with an invalid syntax window when the cart tries to open. Now, lets proceed to add the mandatory tags to the link so we can get our product into the cart (userid, product, price). There is no particular order required but I recommend that you be consistent with the order throughout all your links. It makes it easier to troubleshoot if the need should arise.

Note the ? immediately after the url. This signifies the end of the address and the start of the product information to be passed to the cart.. To look at it in English, it reads "the user identification is 1234567 and the product is a little red wagon and the price of the little red wagon is 29.95". Since no spaces are allowed in an html string we use the + sign to add a space when needed. Without the + sign it would look like LittleRedWagon in the cart. Note also that the $ sign is not used and the & symbol is mandatory to link the name and value pairs together so don't use it in your product description or you'll get a syntax error..

Now, let's add our "Buy Now" button

Note that a + sign is not required between Buy and Now as it is outside of the html string. Note also that we haven't included the qty field as the default is 1. If we sold our product with a minimum quantity of 5, we could insert the field like so.

If you click on the "Buy Now" link below, please set the quantity to "0" in the cart and recalculate before you close the window. Again, I don't want to have too many unused carts using up Mals server resources.

Buy Now

Cart Results

Product	Quantity	Price	Amount
Little Red Wagon		29.95	29.95

All prices are in US Dollars		Subtotal	29.95
		Shipping	0.00

		TOTAL	29.95

Just about done

Note: Every product or form being sent to the cart must have a return link associated with it to enable a continue shopping button to show up in the cart.

So, now lets add our return link as we do want the to provide the customer with an easy way to buy some more of our products without having to find us all over again. The field follows the convention

&return=www.yourdomain.com/yourpage.html

Now add it all together:

Now you know most everything you need to get started adding e-commerce to your site with Mals cart. That wasn't hard now, was it?

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We can also send more than one product to the cart at once with a "buy now link" by using addmulti.cfm as the action part of our link. Click here to find out what's required.

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For those of you who are too busy to read the news on Mals homepage, I brazenly stole the following tidbit. I've purposely put it way down here to make sure you got a little dose of html before you get your hands on the goodies.. All the caveats mentioned above still apply if you use it with wysiwyg editors. As Mal says, no installation is necessary. Just download it to your desktop and use it to your hearts content. I suggest that you cut & paste it in one of the many folders you probably have on your desktop and then "drag" it to your tray to create a shortcut. That way you won't have to minimize your open windows to find it. Move it around to where you want it and It will stay on top so you won't have to hunt for it. Enjoy !!

I will however add a note on the use of this utility. Click on the icon on the upper right to access the settings. Then check the units, return field and hyperlink boxes. Click OK and you're ready to go. The main GUI of the button maker is self-explanatory. Type in your product description (you can use spaces), add the price (no $ symbol), your userid (7 digit number), set the units to "1" (or whatever you need) and add your return URL (No spaces), click on go and it's automatically copied to the clipboard. Insert your curser where you want the product to be placed in html view, click on paste and you're done. Remember to update your settings (return URL) when you change pages.

mButton

This is a simple Windows version of the Button Maker to create your Buy Now links. It will generate the HTML code for either a hyperlink or a form button. As well as taking up less space on your screen it's main advantage is no more cut and paste, just paste...

Download: http://ait2000.com/download/mButton.exe - 731Kb

It's a stand-alone executable file which requires no real installation. Save it to somewhere handy on your hard disk and double click on it to run.