Using Simple Cart Item to Create an Online Store

What is Simple Cart Item?

Simple Cart Item is an add-on product for Plone that allows items for sale to be added to a Plone website. Then site visitors can add items to their carts and, when they are ready, checkout using PayPal (in the future other payment gateways may be supported). More information about Simple Cart Item for Plone and the latest release of the product (and this documentation) can be found at the Simple Cart Item Plone Product page.

Purpose and Prerequisites

This how-to provides step-by-step instructions for adding Simple Cart Items (items for sale) to your website. This documentation assumes that Simple Cart Item 0.5.0 and the required product DataGridField v1.5.2-RC2+ are already installed on your Plone site. It also assumes you already have a PayPal account that is configured to accept payments.

Adding Items to and Configuring Your Website Store

1. Log in and go to the folder to which you would like to add your items for sale.

2. Add a new object of type Simple Cart Item to the folder by clicking on the add item menu and selecting cart item, as shown below. Note that throughout this how-to the images presented will involve a particular sample store folder and item for sale.

3. You will be taken to the "Edit Cart Item" page. The Title, Price, and Extended Description are required, so make sure you fill them out for your item. Below are descriptions of all the fields in the first half of the "Edit Cart Item" page:

• Title - what you want the item to be called at the top of its page and in the site navigation.
• Basic Description - short description of the item.
• Price - the price of the item (in the currency chosen in your settings -- how to change the settings described below).
• Extended Description - detailed item description.

The top half of the "Edit Cart Item" page is shown below.

4. The additional optional properties you can set about your item for sale are Options Label, Options, Image, and Is this item in stock?. Here are descriptions of the fields in the second half of the "Edit Cart Item" page:

• Options Label - what you want the option, if any, for people purchasing this item to be called (for example, this could be set to "Color" or "Size").
• Options - what you want the options, if any, to be and the additional cost or discount for each option. (For example, these could be set to "Red", "Green", and "Blue" with Price Adjustments of ".5", "-3", and "0". This would mean the Red items cost one half a price unit more than the base cost, the Green items cost three price units less than the base cost, and the Blue items cost exactly the base cost.)
• Image - a picture of the item for sale. Be sure to do any resizing before uploading the image.
• Is this item in stock? - checked if the item is currently in stock. If this is not checked, site visitors will be unable to add this item to their carts.

The rest of the "Edit Cart Item" page is shown below.

5. When you are finished editing the item, click the save button at the bottom of the page. You will be taken to the item description page that you just created, as shown below. To make changes to the item later, click on the edit tab at the top of the item description page when you are logged in.

The options you entered in the edit form and their price adjustments will be available here. The expanded options on the item description page are shown below.

6. Repeat steps 2-5 for each item you would like to add to your site.

7. You will need to tell the Simple Cart Item product on your Plone site what your PayPal account is so it can be used when visitors pay for Simple Cart Item purchases. This can be done on the "Simple Cart Item Settings" page, which can be accessed from the site setup section of your Plone site. It is in the "Add-on Product Configuration" section and the link to it is called "Simple Cart Item Config". You can also make a few other configuration changes there. The possible configuration items are:

• Account id - the email address associated with your PayPal merchant account (at this time only PayPal is supported).
• Currency Code - type of currency you want your prices to display and be collected in.
• Cancel Page - page on your site visitors are taken to if they click checkout when viewing their cart but then cancel the transaction once at PayPal. You will want to create a specific page for this purpose, and the page will need to exist when the settings are saved or you will get an error.
• Thank You page - page on your site visitors are taken to after they complete the checkout transaction through PayPal. Again, you will want to create a specific page for this purpose, and the page will need to exist when the settings are saved or you will get an error.

The the "Simple Cart Item Settings" page is shown below.