Yes and the service makes a profit too! Nearly all the revenue these days comes from people upgrading to the Premium service. Premium accounts are for busy merchants so it's important to me that the free service is good and that you do well...
Basically anyone with a computer and an Internet connection. Individuals, clubs, schools, charities and small businesses are amongst the users.
However we absolutely will not host a cart for any site that includes; porn, racist or sexist material, any so called "adult" content, software for spamming or spam lists. We will delete any account that has this sort of material. If you are unsure if this might include you or your organization then please ask first.
The shopping cart can be bolted onto an existing website relatively seamlessly using only HTML, however we think it's fair to say that you do need at least a basic understanding of HTML. In particular you need to know how hyperlinks are constructed and how to create an HTML form. The information in Support assumes that you have that knowledge.
Tutorials on basic HTML can be found at:
Yes. We don't mind if you operate multiple stores.
No. We don't host your product pages and the cart doesn't use a product database so there can be no restrictions on the number products you can have.
The only restriction you might find is if you are selling goods which are downloaded on the internet, for example software or .mp3 music files. The limits in the download system are 50 products for a free account and 500 for Premium.
The shopping cart is designed for small businesses, it is not suitable for high volume merchants. Although there are no specific limits on the numbers of orders, I recommend it as being suitable for merchants processing less than 30 orders per day for a Free account and 150 orders per day for Premium. More than that and you will find your order processing needs require a higher level of automation than is appropriate for lower volume merchants.
For a detailed discussion on accepting credit cards, click here....
You can use any currency with the cart. Numeric values can be displayed using the following formats:
The cart can be setup to use one of the following languages:
We do not support the recurring billing systems of third party payment processors at the moment.
The URL for the main "add to the cart" link is:
http://ww#.aitsafe.com/cf/add.cfm?
After the ?, question mark, you need to set these fields:
Your link should look something like this:
<A HREF="http://ww#.aitsafe.com/cf/add.cfm?userid=gg12345&
product=Product+description&price=29.50"> Buy Now </A>
Note: there should be no spaces in the link, it should be on one line.
You need to add the optional field "return" into all your links to the cart. That includes your Review cart links as well as your Buy Now buttons.
The return field can be set to any page at your website:
...&return=www.yoursite.com/page.htm
or for a form
<input type=hidden name=return value=www.yoursite.com/page.htm>
Some people have had problems when the return link points to a directory, www.yoursite.com/dir , instead of a file.
This means your web server won't accept a form POST for that page, that method is often reserved only for scripts and doesn't work with ordinary web pages. The fix is to login to Admin and set it back to a GET in the cart setup (Cart setup > Continue shopping).
To see the cart at any time your customers can follow this link:
<A HREF="http://ww#.aitsafe.com/cf/review.cfm?userid=your_userID"> Review Cart </A>
We recommend that you use the same link when your customer wishes to finish and pay.
Yes you can. What this means is you link to the cart using a HTML form instead of an ordinary hyperlink. You need to set at least your username, the product description and the price again, for example;
<FORM METHOD="POST" ACTION="http://ww#.aitsafe.com/cf/add.cfm">
<INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="userid" VALUE="gg12345">
<INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="product" VALUE="North Atlantic Marine Chart">
<INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="price" VALUE="29.50">
<INPUT TYPE="SUBMIT" VALUE="BUY IT NOW!">
</FORM>
You can add something to the cart using a drop down list, radio buttons or any HTML form tag. For example like this;
Choose the color of boat you want:
Yes you can. The length of the fields for these messages is restricted to 255 characters and some HTML tags take up a lot of space. There is certainly room for <font face="Arial"> type tags though.
All accounts have two passwords. One is for login to Admin, the Login password, and the other is for access to data collected from customers securely, the Secure or Payments password. The Login password is issued when the account is first created and you can change it in Admin. The Payment password is created the first time you login and can only be reset.
If you loose your login password: click here...
If you loose your Payments password, login to Admin and there is a link to reset it in the right hand column of the opening page.
You will not receive an email notification with payment systems where the final thank you page is not hosted by the cart. We can't send you an email notification of an order if we don't know if there is one....
The first thing to do is to check your email address very, very carefully. It's too easy to make a mistake; we all do it from time to time. Also don't forget that email can sometimes take hours to arrive. That's perfectly normal and just means your ISP's mail server is under maintenance.
However, it is an unfortunate fact that these notifications look almost identical to spam (in some ways they are!) and more and more ISPs are now blocking this type of message. The only thing you can do is either change email addresses or ask your ISP to create an exception for email originating from mail.mals-e.net.
Finally, email as a protocol is not 100% reliable. Most ISPs reckon to lose about 1 in 100 emails simply because of down-time on their mail or DNS servers. Some errors will mean that a message will be queued for up to five days but others will result in it being dropped immediately.
I do not recommend AOL, Yahoo and Comcast.net's mail services. They have been consistently unreliable recently, particularly at busy times. By contrast, the other major mail services like Hotmail, Gmail, etc. generally seem to be much better these days.
The error message means you have a syntax problem in your links, usually when they are made with a hyperlink. Look at the source code in your browser. Common problems are:
Login to Admin and go to Cart Setup >> Link verification, uncheck the checkbox and hit submit. Remove the field named hash from your Buy Now links.
Many payment processors, including PayPal, require that the cart passes the country over as two letter ISO code. In that case the cart will use a drop downlist for the customer to select their country. Click here to view the list of ISO countries.