AlteredWood@Night

I spent the last week or so working on adapting a shopping cart to AlteredWood. It’s the one I asked about on one of the WebProWorld forums. I couldn’t find anything else that I thought might work. It’s from ShoppingCart.org.

It seems pretty complicated to me. Someone put a lot of time into developing it. I put a lot (for me) of time into trying to figure it out. I’m pretty much at a loss when it comes to programing languages. This is written in Perl and I don’t know what all the symbols mean, but I got enough of an idea of how it works to use it.

I have the cart looking like one of my pages so the customers feel at home when they get to that page. I’m happy about that. And it works! The first jewelry box that I sold using it was subtracted from the inventory. Hooray. That was one of the uses that I got it for. The other was discount coupons, and that worked also. 20% off from now until the 22nd.

Just one thing left to do, or at least one major thing. When you click on an item that is out of stock, it takes you to a page with only a header and the rest is blank. If I click on an item that is not listed, it takes me to a page that says the cart is empty. That’s what I want to happen when the item is out of stock. I have to work on that. It might take me a while to figure out how to do that. More to come.

Man, there are a bunch of shopping carts out there. Hundreds, I think. Most, if not all of them, have storefronts with them. That’s not what I’m looking for. I don’t want to change my website any more than I need to.

I have been using PayPal, and it’s working well. But someone asked me the other night if I would give a group a discount. I can’t do that with the PayPal shopping cart. Also, I’ve been worrying that I would sell one of my jewelry boxes twice. That wouldn’t be very good. I try to get every sold jewelry box or other item marked as sold as soon as I can, but one of these days someone is going to add an item that has already been sold. So, I could use some software that would stop that.

I think I might have found what I need. I have asked on WebProWorld if any one has any feedback about paypalshoppingcart.org. With it I can just use my own buttons and PayPal and it will let me do much more. I’m hoping that it gets good marks from the forum. 

I got the bulbs. They are bright and the light is just like the daylight (5000K). I wired up a couple of ceramic sockets and have tried different positions for the bulbs. It looks like they are going to work well.
I still want to make the box bigger, but I haven’t had a chance to do that yet. I think I’ll be able to get to that this week.