Overview:

The Integral Accounting Enterprise System comes with a complete asp dot net based shopping cart, which includes the ability for customers to log-on, place orders, view order history, review and re-print old invoices, maintain their customer information and enter and change their ship-to addresses. The shopping cart supports multiple payment methods and is very user friendly. The shopping cart posts all orders and customer information directly into the Enterprise system.

The Integral Accounting Enterprise Shopping cart is administered directly from the main system, all of the Inventory Items, Item Categories, Families when entered and changed in the Integral Accounting Enterprise system have those changes appear automatically in the Shopping Cart. Orders that come in through the shopping cart appear in the Integral Accounting Enterprise Orders screen just like a manually typed in order, and the orders can be processed using the same procedures as for your regular orders.

The shopping cart is automatically and dynamically created from the information that you enter into the Item Families, Item Categories, and Items tables. Item Families and Item Categories are used to allow large numbers of inventory items to be easily organized. Please give careful thought to the Item Families and Item Category set-up in the system.

You can get a good feel for how the Families and Categories work by reviewing the sample shopping cart data and how it is organized. 

You can view the sample Enterprise Shopping cart here: http://www.stfb.net/EnterpriseCart/default.aspx?CompanyID=DINOS

After you become familiar with the system, you would probably like to change the visual interface of the integrated Shopping Cart. In order to do this, you have to know the links needed by the shopping cart and how they work.

Read this section carefully as it contains information about the various categories of links the shopping cart uses:

The Families, Categories, and Item Links:

The shopping cart system starts on the main.aspx page, which displays the Item Families in the system. When a family is selected by the user here, all of the inventory categories belonging to that family are then displayed by the cartcategories.aspx page. Selecting a category will display a list of the items in that category using the cartitemlist.aspx page. Once a single item is selected, it is displayed using the cartitem.aspx page. The cartitem.aspx page will allow you to add an item to the shopping cart.

The cartitem.aspx page can be called directly and accepts FamilyID, CategoryID, and ItemID as parameters. Using this method of adding items to the cart is very useful if you don't want to use Integral Accounting Internet's automatically generated e-commerce site but still want the shopping cart and order checkout functionality.

Search

Item information can also be found through the use of the search screen which allows customers to do advanced searches for the items they are looking for.

View Cart / Checkout:

After the customer selects an item to be added to the cart, they are taken to the view cart screen where a summary of their order is displayed. The customer can then either go back and select more items to add to the cart or they can proceed to the checkout page and complete their order.

During checkout, the customer has the option of selecting one of their predefined ship-to's, or adding another ship-to, and selecting payment information. 

Important Note: As with any other shopping carts, the customer ordering your products must have an account at your company. If he does not already have an account, the shopping cart supports the automatic creation of customer accounts on the fly, and this information is automatically posted to the accounting systems customer table.

View Order Status / Order History:

The customer has the ability, after signing into the system, to look at their order status which shows all open and shipped orders with tracking numbers so they can track any shipment. This screen also displays their closed invoices so they can see a complete history of their transactions and they can re-print an invoice if they need to.

Customer Account Maintenance:

A customer has the ability to maintain all of their own customer information within the system. They can add ship-tos, change their email address, customer login / password and other customer information.