Chapter 1: What's New in v2.0?

Chapter 1: What's New in v2.0?

NetStores v2.0 provides many new features that will help you create online stores that consumers enjoy. These changes include:

Shopping baskets: Customer's "shopping baskets" retain items as customers move from store to store within your mall. You can provide links to let customers view their "shopping basket" from any of your pages. In addition , most NetStores pages contain several new buttons for searching and ordering. (See page 18.)
Custom interface: You can create custom HTML pages for items you want to promote. (This replaces the o ld gen-cat interface.) (See page 11.)
Search results: You can create links that automatically display any set of search results you like. For example, you might want a link that lists "bestsel lers." (See page 7.) The Results page can include thumbnail images of products. (See page 16.) In addition, the Results page and invoice can contain any number of fields. (The previous limit was 5 fields.) (See page 17.) And, you can continue a search from the Results page to find more items than the number you selected in the Search page. (See page 18.)
Account numbers: Customers need not provide an account number until they are ready to complete an order.
Shipping charges: You can allow customers to select a UPS shipping method and add shipping charges based on their s election. You can also compute shipping and handling charges based on the weight or quantity of the items ordered. (See page 10 and page 19.)
Inventory: You can use NetStores to create an inventory reporting interface (in addition to using it for shopping interfaces). (See page 19.)
Analysis tools: Merchants and mall owners can get a report of the search es customers are performing most often. (See page 7.)
Tables: Because almost all browsers now support tables, NetStores always uses tables to display results. Previously, it displayed tables only if you were using Netscape (or a browser that identified itself with the word "Mozilla").

Internally, the NetStores software has been rewritten in Perl. This will allow the NetStores software to run on platforms other than UNIX. Contact NetStores if you are interested in using NetStores on a particular platform.