Prostores
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Prostores shopping cart is a shopping cart that is owned by the company eBay. The Prostores shopping cart is a shopping cart application that allows someone to make a transaction using either a payment processor or other payment methods such as Paypal.
Prostores interface is simple to set up. It starts off asking the user to put in their merchant information such as name, email address, phone number, and postal code.
There are many different names that different versions of Prostores goes by, including the names that the retail version gives the merchant, but the generic names of these classes by developers at Prostores and at Resellers who create these are Starter, Standard, and Professional. There is another version called Enterprise, but its use is only for affilites who sell using the cart product to sell want someone else's product or services.
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[edit] Starter Package
The Starter prostores's interface is a simple user interface because of the huge icons on the left side of the screen for naviagion in set up process. These icons will then bring up a menu bar above each one of the icons in the middle of the page that can be click on. That is called the navigation sub-menu bar. This is used to go to such pages as the payment preferences or shipping preferences.
The Starter Prostores is the bare bone version of the Prostores application. The Starter Prostores only allows 100 products to be loaded into the application. Once this is done, the merchant can no longer add any more products into the shopping cart and has to re edit the products already in the application.
The Starter package has no categories and only has a tab that says products on the index page. This makes it so all the items are grouped in one category which default is products. Also ordering of the product list is completely done by numeric then by alpha characters.
The Starter package does not allow for any additional uses other than the generic ones across the board for all the different Prostores. This includes importing and exporting excel spread sheets.
The starter is commonly thought of as the Prostores that is easiest to set up because most of the functionality that Prostores offers is not offered in the starter. The set up gives the merchant an output of a generic shopping cart that can handle payment processes but without the functionalities of the other packages.
[edit] Standard Package
The Standard package has some of the best features of Prostores. This version is the one that is for business that are already out there in the world and are trying to get their products online but do not want to lose any of the functionality in how many products they can serve to the public.
It first offers you unlimited products and unlimited categories. This allows you to create items in your cart and then assign them directly to the category that you want it to appear at. Standard package also allows the installation of Dreamweaver Extensions. Dreamweaver Extensions allow you to connect your Prostores Shopping cart application to your Dreamweaver HTML editor. You can then use the GUI interface of Dreamweaver to make changes actively to your Prostore and then publish them back on to the server for the Prostore.
The Standard package also allows the merchant to have more functionality with the listing with eBay and also gives the user more options for their shopping cart than the Starter. Quick listing on eBay is available with the Standard addition. You can also use the design studio to make changes to your site if you do not have Dreamweaver to make those changes to your storefront. You can also set a baseline (a way for you to go back to your site before you published any changes) to your Prostore so if you make any errors in your code, you can revert to the original baseline that you set.
[edit] Professional Package
The Professional Prostores package is very similar to the standard version, in fact, visually, it's hard to be able to tell the difference. The biggest features of the Professional Prostores are that you able to have a product have multiple sizes with multiple prices totals to those products. This allows the functionality of having only one product name for multiple product sizes. Other features include being able to set up an electronic download for a product that has been purchased. (example would be someone who wants to purchase a song from a merchant, the customer makes the purchase, then receives an email that has the link for the song to download to the their computer). Because of these features, the Professional Prostore is not used as often as the Standard because of the functionality it has. Only certain business uses are not covered using the Standard.
[edit] Dreamweaver and Prostores
When you purchase anything above a starter for Prostores, you are able to use the feature called, "Dreamweaver Extensions". This allows you to contact your shopping cart to your HTML Dreamweaver Once you connect your shopping cart to your Dreamweaver program, you are able to make changes using Dreamweaver's GUI interface to make changes on the fly and publish them back to your Prostore. This allow the designer more options in how to create different designs for their page instead of using the default template that is installed when setting up Prostores.
It should be noted that certain ProStore features and the Dreamweaver Extension are not compatible with the Apple Macintosh computer and software which runs on this platform.
[edit] Prostores Version 8
The newest version of Prostores is version 8. The biggest change to this version of Prostores was the location of Design Studio and how the software has evolved into more of a what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor, known more commonly as WYSIWYG. This allows the user not to be as knowledgeable about HTML coding and Prostores coding, but still able to design and customize a site by using a built-in editor. The editor is simple to use and edit a storefront to be any design imaginable. By creating this tool, Prostores made it easier for its customers to be able to create more customized solutions.
