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About MetaCart Free
Overview
Hardware/Software Requirements
Credit Card Processing
Installation/Setup
Support/Add-ins
Overview
The MetaCart Free eCommerce
Shopping Cart System for Small Businesses and Developers is fully
customizable for easy integration into your web site. To adapt the
code to your own site, you will need to know HTML and have some
familiarity with Active Server Pages, VBScript and MS Access databases.
MetaCart Free is a server/client
shopping system based on Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) technology
hooked to a Microsoft Access (*.mdb) database.
After installation and setup, the
system readies your site for eCommerce. Customers can peruse your
catalog of products and add the items they wish to purchase to their
"shopping basket."
The customer then enters shipping
and payment details and submits his/her order, which is then processed
and posted to a database.
The MetaCart eCommerce applications
are designed for manual credit card processing, but can
be adapted to work with the Pay2See,
iBill or WorldPay
systems, which do not require merchant accounts, or can be hooked
to full-blown real-time credit card processing agents such as CyberSource,
or electronic pay-by-check software. See "Credit
Card Processing" below for more information regarding accepting
credit card payments.
Hardware/Software
Requirements
To use MetaCart, your eCommerce
site will need to be hosted on a web server that supports Active
Server Pages, such as Microsoft NT Server with at least Internet
Information Server (IIS) 4.0 or Windows 2000 Server with IIS 5.0.
You will also need a good website
design and HTML editing program (such as FrontPage 2000 or Visual
InterDev 6.0), and Microsoft Access to create your own database
or to edit the one that comes with the application. MetaCart
was developed using FrontPage 2000, Visual Basic 6.0, and Visual
InterDev 6.0 on a Windows 98 platform using Visual Studio 6.0 with
Personal Web Server with Windows NT Option Pack 4. The MetaCart
demo is hosted on a Windows 2000 NT Server.
For MetaCart to work
properly on your local Windows NT or Windows 95/98 machine, you
will need to have Microsoft Personal Web Server 4.0 with Windows
NT Option Pack 4 installed. You can download the option pack from
Microsoft's web site.
The only requirement for your customers
is that their machine accept cookies since the application uses
browser session cookies for some features. The cookies expire when
the user session expires. No cookies are permanently stored on the
customer's computer.
Credit Card
Processing
The application assumes you will
do manual credit card processing. To use MetaCart
for real-time credit card processing, you will need an online merchant
account with a bank, an account with an internet credit card processing
agent (e.g., CyberSource),
and a security certificate for access to your server's secure socket
layer (SSL) for secure transactions. Thawte
and VeriSign
are the two largest issuers of SSL server certificates. Most of
these services can be provided by the internet service provider
(ISP) hosting your eCommerce web site. One of the largest eCommerce
hosting companies is Interland,
who hosts this site.
For a complete rundown of accepting
credit cards online, see the article, "What
You Will Need - Plain and Simple."
Additional Installation/Setup Instructions
Additional installation and setup
instructions, as well as the End-User License Agreement, are included
in the README.txt file, in the MetaCart eCommerce application
download package. Use of MetaCart is governed
by the terms of this Agreement. The code pages also contain instructions
for modfiying the application.
NOTE: The README_dsnless.txt
file includes resources for finding answers to the most frequently
encountered problems with installation of ASP-based applications.
These involve the correct directory location of the global.asa file, the
proper setting of permissions on a network or hosting server and
connecting to the database. Please read these instructions carefully.
Support/Add-Ins
MetaLinks.com provides limited
installation and setup support for MetaCart . You may e-mail
us directly or post a message in our guest book. Should you discover
any bugs in the application, please notify us so we can post any
fixes to our master download file and provide information on this
site to other users.
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