There are several ways that you can customize the ShopSite screens that your sellers see.

Put your company's name and address in the page footer

The footer of the main ShopSite screen has space for the name, phone number, and support e-mail address of your company. By default, this part of the screen is within an HTML comment tag so that it is not visible. It is highly recommended that you replace these placeholders with the real information for your company and remove the comment tags. You can also edit some of the other text in the footer. Open the global.aa file in the SHOPSITE_DIRECTORY directory and make the changes in the footer paragraph.

Put your company's logo in the page footer

You can replace the ShopSite logo that appears in the footer of every page with your own logo. Edit the global.aa file and change the vendor_logo value to point at your own graphic.

Create Your Own "Keys to Seller Success" Page

On the main ShopSite screen that merchants see, there is link titled, "Keys to Seller Success." This link leads to a page that gives general advice about starting and running an online store. You can create your own page (or pages) and change the text and link on the ShopSite screen to point merchants to your page. Edit the global.aa file and replace the help_text value with your own HTML string.

Customize the "Banner Ads" Page

The Banner Ads button in the Merchandising section of ShopSite opens a page that briefly discusses using banner advertising, and has a few links to companies that provide that service. You can have this button lead to your own page about banner ads by editing the global.aa file and setting the banner_ad_link value to the full URL of the destination page.

Customize the "Search Engines" Page

The Search Engines button in the Merchandising section of ShopSite opens a page that briefly discusses search engines and has a few links to sites that help merchants register with search engines. You can have this button lead to your own page about search engines by editing the global.aa file and setting the search_engine_link value to the full URL of the destination page.

Change Customer Receipts to Link to Your Own Marketplace

When a customer in any store in your mall concludes a purchase, they will see a receipt page in their browser. At the top of the receipt are two buttons: one for returning to the store, and another to go to the "marketplace." By default, the marketplace link points to the ShopSite marketplace at Open Market. You can change the link and graphic to point to your own mall. Edit the global.aa file and change the marketplace value to point at your own mall and graphic.

Change the text on the "Next Step" page

When a new seller completes the store setup wizard, he is presented with a "Next Step" page that offers congratulations and gives a few bits of advice, including who he can contact for help. You can customize this information by editing the isp.aa file in the SHOPSITE_DIRECTORY/nls/language directory.

Replace the standard graphics with your own

You can replace any or all of the graphics seen by sellers when they are configuring and administering their stores, including all buttons and logos. All of the image files are in the shopsite-images directory that you defined during installation. If you replace any images, the new images must have the same file names and be the same dimensions as the original images.

Change the List of Available Colors

You can change the list of colors available to each store by editing the pagepalette.dat file located in the store's data directory. You can add or remove any color that you want in the pull-down list that the seller sees. Just be sure the hex number has a '#' symbol in front of it (e.g. #FFE4C0). This does not allow you to directly enter hex color values from ShopSite -- you must still use the pull-down list. If you remove colors then certain Themes will not be available.

Customize the Order Form (ShopSite TX only)

Once a store is initialized on the content server, you can customize the order form screens for that store. For more information, see the Transact book Customization: Editing Smart Pages for a Global Audience, part number 42-11520-A01.

Customize Error Message Displays

You can customize the headers and footers displayed with error messages. The error message screen that a seller might see is comprised of an HTML header, the text of the error message, and an HTML footer. You cannot change the text of the error messages, but you can change the HTML header and footer. Create and edit the files bo_error_head.html and bo_error_tail.html in the ShopSite directory and in the Shopping Cart directory. Note that these files do not exist until you create them.