Can I use BC's e-commerce in a Muse site?

[hawken04]

I have designed a site in Muse but need to add a store section.  I need more functionality than just paypal buttons. I need a shopping cart system.  I have a Businss Catalyst e-commerce account.  Is it possible to use the catalogs and shopping cart system in BC on a Muse site in any way?  I am a print designer and don't have a lot of code experience.  Would it be better all around for me to take the time to learn Dreamweaver.  I have some experience with it but not alot.  I really like the ease of using Muse for the rest of the site, it's just figuring out how to get a store section into it that is giving me headaches.

Thanks

Josh

[topelovely]

Go ahead and use BC ecommerce with Muse. It is beautiful. send me a private mail so that I can show you a project am working on now.

[GX_Outpost_LLC]

I am Barry, very interested in getting some help on BC for Ecom.

barry@vpbuzz.com

[TandS7466]

Just looking through this and i would like to put a store on a muse site. Im thinking of purchasing webcommerce? can i see how it looks useing BC Webcommerce?

[DistressedCouture]

Try Wazala. Works great

[nowgroup]

I am in the same situation. Really would be good to use BC to manage items in muse rather than paypal buttons etc - I have looked for more info on this but am not getting very far

[topelovely]

Send me a private mail and we can take it from there.

[Vinayak_Gupta]

You might want to begin with checking out the Jam session on Advanced CMS Integration with Business Catalyst as well - http://my.adobeconnect.com/p843w8dk0w9

Various other event recordings can be found here - http://muse.adobe.com/events.html

Thanks,

Vinayak

[Page Simon]

It would be great to find a place to get simple answers to e-commerce questions, not some that might or might not be part of an hour-long jam session. Easy (I hope) questions:

1) Does Business Catalyst provide me with shopping cart software that I can integrate into a Muse site or do I need to buy one elsewhere?

1a) If so, can customers pay with PayPal?

2) Can I just use PayPal software with Muse. I've read postings that say it's a mess trying to create a dynamic site with Muse.

2a) If I can and do try to put the PayPal HTML into my site, is there help somewhere for how to do this?

I waited 40 minutes on the phone for someone at Business Catalyst to answer some of these questions, then got someone who said he'd transfer me to the Muse help people and then got cut off... Hoping for some information here. (Adobe phone help seems to be IMPOSSIBLE!)

[iamDK]

Page Simon,

It a little bit more involved than those simple questions you just asked. 1) yes 1a) yes 2) yes. 2a) yes.

However they might not be simple and easily implemented. Like the BC questions you asked. Yes BC has a full featured shopping cart and shop that can be implemented into Muse but its quite involved to get them both running together. It also helps to have BC knowledge prior.

Now are you asking for help or are you asking for a 20 page step by step tutorial? I would learn the basics of BC before trying this stuff. There have been tons of posts about BC integration by people that don't even know how to use it which makes no sense to me, why wouldn't someone look into it before asking for help adding it to Muse?

[Page Simon]

Thank you! I've been reading about BC but I'm not sure I need it. I don't need inventory help, for instance, or tracking of visits, etc. I am only selling a few items just now. In your opinion, would it be best just to try to integrate PayPal into my site by pasting their html into html objects in Muse? Do you have experience that indicates that would work?

[iamDK]

Hey Page Simon,

If you are only wanting to sell a few items on your website BC would be way over kill in my opinion. What I would do is just make my own little eshop with a small gallery that links each product to its own description page, then link some Paypal buy buttons to each product page on your site. You can read more about adding buy buttons on Paypals website or google " how to add buy buttons on my website" ect. Then just add those using the html object. It should be pretty simple if you are selling simple products without a lot of options, ie different sizes or color of the same thing. It has been awhile since I have added any Paypal options like that so this is all off the top of my head which means there could be even more options for you to add.

[Page Simon]

Thank you! I'll give it a try.

[TommyHood]

UrDK. No need to be condecending.

[dexbrady]

We have been asking about this for over a year, nothing has changed in this one specific area, how do you add the shopping cart features from BC to a website built in Muse? You keep telling us to look at videos that talk about adding Muse to BC. That's not what are asking. We are asking for the reverse. I built the website in Muse, I already laid out the whole page, product images and descriptions in Muse, I created all the buttons and they need hyperlink info to direct them to the checkout, my website is hosted for 38$ a month on BC and now I need to connect them. How do I do that?

[FlatCrank]

I couldn't agree more dexbrady.   I'm just a small business with 20-30 basic items to sell through the website and need a very basic website with a solid eCommerce section.   I don't want to handle CC encryption so I will put the payments through PayPal.   Please let me know if you've found anything to help with the simplicity of setting up the main site with Muse and then setting up a page with a basic Shopping Cart, Payment page, and order confirmation.   I want to get around all the voodoo language which seems to run wild in the website business and manage my own business/site.   Initially, I was excited to see that Muse may be the answer but it too has become "coded magic!"  Appreciate any input you may offer.

Dear Adobe,

There is a great need out there for business' which would like to have a decent ecommerce site but would like to control and manage their site(s) internally.   We would like to accomplish all this without all the "Top Secret" code/talk which can be used as a way to control and manipulate a business' finances and management. 

Thanks!

[agreatalias]

why not try squarespace. If you're not into creating code and just want something that is content forward you really can't beat squarespace

[hawken04]

So I thought I would update this as I have been working on it for quite a while and i'd share what I figured out or have been taught by others on this forum.  You can use BC's modules within a muse site.  The main secret to doing it is making a template in muse for each module that you want to use. I needed an online store for my site.  I created the master page of my site in Muse and then added each page I needed like "About Us", "Online Store", "Blog" "Contact Us" etc. Then in the page for my Online Store I made thumbnails for each catalog of products that I wanted to link to, ex. Prints, Posters, Cards, Calendars.  Now still in muse I made a new page for each catalog, still based on my Muse master page, these will be the templates. Make sure you exclude these pages from any menus.  I put mine all under my Online Store page.  I named each page things like "prints_temp" and "posters_temp". Next I went to each individual Muse template page that I just created and inserted this html {tag_pagecontent}.  You can resize this box to the size you want your module to fit into and place it whereever you want it on the page.  Now publish everything to your BC e-commerce site.

     Now when you create a new catalog in the e-commerce section of BC you will see a drop down list of templates to use with that catalog.  If you inserted the above html in your muse pages and published them, you should see each of the pages that you created.  Use the template page that you made in Muse for that particular catalog.  Now under the template list you will see a link that you can copy and add to your Store home page to link to that catalog.  You can make templates in muse for the shopping cart page as well as the checkout page.  You can find the area to change those templates in BC under Site Manager>Module Templates>Online Store Templates.  Again you just need to create the pages in muse and insert {tag_pagecontent} to make it a useable template in BC.

     I have also figured out that you can make the blog and other modules work in much the same way but you have to use a little different tag when you insert the HTML into the page.  I think the blog was {module_blogsitepost,10} but this was applied to the blog page itself not a template.  Anyway, I'm no expert and can't gaurantee this will work for what someone else needs but it's going in the right direction I think.

Josh

[Ron Obvious]

Hello Hawken04 and Vinajak.

I have done websites for about 20 years.  I also have now done about 15 websites with Muse.  I now have a client that wants to do an eCommerce site.  Here in the B.C. form I see a six part series to set this up under help and support.  The one with Nicole Windham.

HOWEVER, it looks like she is building an eCommerce site for IKEA!  I just need a simple site.  I.E.  On a regular Muse website that I've already built -  next to each product (about 20 items) is an "add to shopping cart icon" (that I would add).  Somewhere on each of these pages is also a "view shopping cart" icon.  The customer wanders throughout the site adding items to the "shopping cart".  They then go to the shopping cart page, add there payment, delivery method.   Emails are also sent to the customer (confirmation) and website owner - indicating what products they now need to send out to the customer.

Is there anywhere in the BC. site where I could learn how to do this "simple" (101) method.

Vinayak,

Could you show us a simple site, not a one hour + tutorial, of how to do this.

eg:

In Muse one master page, then a simple home page.  On that page are three items for sale.  There is a picture of each item - some text a price and a shopping cart button for each one. 

I really believe that once people see how this is done, most of us can fiqure out how to build the rest of the site from there.

Regards

Ron O. Vermeulen

www.mermaidskissgallery.com

dragonflymobile@gmail.com

[MBC10519]

Josh (Hawken04), Thanks for being a bit better descriptive than what Adobe has even tried to put out there. I know some of the senior adobe folks try their best to answer questions but most of the time, we see standard boiler plate answers that most of us already know.

I agree with Ron on his observation and was reading this thread to see if someone responded to him.

In the last 72 hrs, I have pretty much gotten to the point what Josh has explained here, however the brickwall that we hit and in the process of asking the BC/ecommerce forum for help is ..

1. We want to add a shopping cart button and simple checkout.

2. We probably have less than 15 products.

3. We dont want to use WAZALA BAZALA etc

4. We are not tech savy and thats why we came to use Muse

The issue at hand, we got the shopping cart working and it adds to cart etc, but then once the checkout page comes, it is all controlled by BC module and it runs on its own. Not so simple. Yes. We tried and I watched all the hour long Jam sessions and tutorials. They all helped. But still the fine details on how the limitations kick in is just mind boggling.

There should be a simple easy cart which could be customized in Muse. I shouldnt try to create Ikea or Macy's for just my 15 products or be forced to go to Wazala because its easy. Why pay another ecommerce provider and where does this sanity of paying multiple hosting providers stop?

Muse is very powerful but its like tying your shoe laces togather and attempting to run !!!! We have a pretty spiffy looking website and thanks to Muse, but anything else you want to add, its like you have to go back to school to get a degree in computer programming when all you need is to learn 5 steps of basic algebra. And we are missing those 5 steps as help or FAQ from the Muse team.

[DistressedCouture]

I've had some problems as well trying to add a shopping cart through muse and Bc. What I feel might be easier for you to do is create your product pages in  Muse and create a check out page in Bc. Delete all other pages of the template in Bc but the check out and/or shopping cart pages. Then once you publish these pages in Bc with a domain name in ex: "Websiteshoppingcart.com. Use that link and embed that link on your products pictures on your muse page. Once your page is live in Muse it will re direct to your shopping cart page you created in Bc.

Distressed Couture Ricardo Anthony

www.facebook.com/distressedcoutureclothingcompany

[NiMo-Studios]

How does the site navigation translate from Muse to BC?

[ChrisDigitalTao]

cant tell you how helpful this post has been - cheers!  

[hawken04]

Check out http://www.robertduncanstudios.com if you would like to see the site I ended up making with Muse and BC for e-commerce.  It ended up working pretty well.  I'm still fixing a few things but pretty happy overall.

[Lightbonds]

Great Job!

I have a question how did you get the products to show up with the images?

All I can see on BC is adding the Catalogs in as plain text not like you did it when you click New Releases.