Mal's E-Commerce Shopping Cart is a remotely hosted secure shopping cart service that can be quickly integrated into most websites with the simple addition of html form code for "Buy Now" buttons. There are two levels of Shopping Carts available with Mal's E-Commerce. The most popular one is the free service that provides basic features to add items to a cart, collect the shoppers shipping information, securely collect credit card information through SSL technology, notify both the purchaser and store owner at the completion of the transaction by email, and an administrative interface for the store owner to retrieve the credit card information securely for offline card processing. The premium service adds enhanced convenience features for high transaction volume stores such as online credit card authorization through most popular processing gateways and batch download of transactions instead of the one at a time interface of the free service.
Mal's E-Commerce is designed for ease of use in day-to-day activities. When a customer places an order, an email will be sent to the storeowner notifying them of the order. The owner will then logon to the administrative page to view the order and the billing information. After processing the order, they can then delete the order from the server and logoff. The steps to do this are:
1) Logon to the admin server by going to https://www.mals-e.com/admin or clicking
the link included in the notification email.
2) The User Name is the seven-digit number that you were assigned when the account
was created the password is the main account password, not the secure area password
used to access the billing information.
3) After you login, you will be on the "ADMINISTRATION AREA HOME"
page. This page has a summary of all the orders that are stored in the system.
4) If you have not done so already there will be a message requesting you to
set the password for the secured billing information. This is the area that
stores customer credit card information so you should have a different password
for it than your main cart administration system. This way you can have a webmaster
make changes to the cart without giving them access to your customers credit
card information.
5) The first step in retrieving an order is to click on the "List Orders"
link on the left hand side of the page. This will take you to a list of all
the orders stored in the system.
6) Click the "Details" link on the far right of the order line. This
will take you to the details page that contains the customer information, what
was ordered, and the payment type. It does not contain the credit card number
though.
7) Print this page for your records using the browsers print feature.
8) If the payment method was Credit Card, then you will need to perform an extra
step to get the card information.
9) Click on the "Payments" link on the left hand side of the page.
This will bring up a page with a dropdown list of all order numbers that contain
card data.
10) Select the order that you want, enter the password you set for the secure
area, and press the Download button to display the billing information.
11) Print the page for your records and so that you can enter the transaction
into your credit card terminal as a mail/phone order.
12) After you are done printing the order information pages, it is best to delete
them from the server both for organization and security.
13) Click on the "List Orders" link on the left side again to display
the list of orders.
14) Click on the box under the "Delete?" column of the list to check
(select) the order.
15) Click the "Delete Records" button to permanently delete the order
from the server. There is no confirmation or undo function, so make sure you
select the right orders. I usually do them all at once at the end to make sure
I do not delete one accidentally.
16) You can now click the "Log Out" link on the left to exit the admin
section.
Complete documentation with examples is available on the Mal's E-Commerce website at http://www.mals-e.com/support/free_cart_support.htm along with links to third party documentation. I will highlight a few of the common things that may need to be set or changed from the default settings below. All modifications are done in the administrative section of the website. Start by Logging into the admin home page as described above and click on the "Cart set-up" link to access the configuration pages.
The link to set the types of payments you select is at the bottom right of the page. The standard payments link is where you set up credit cards, money orders, and checks. For credit cards you enter the names of the cards you accept in the box at the top for example: MasterCard,Visa,Discover. If you leave the box blank, then credit card will not show up as a payment option. There is a checkbox for Money Order, but not one for a standard paper check. You can configure a paper check acceptance by entering Check in the first field under "Other Non-secure payments". The checks section above this is only used if you are processing electronic checks.
This section is reached via the "Sales Tax" link halfway down the left hand column. In it you can set the sales tax rate, whether shipping charges are taxed as well as the total, and what state to apply taxes to.
This is a complex topic and it is best to read the full documentation if you plan to use anything besides a basic fixed value. Option 4 allows you to set up a dropdown box for customers to choose a type of shipping for example Ground, 2-Day, or Overnight with different cost for each.
These are set in the "Currency and Cart Messages" page. This page allows you to set the currency type to use, set up a customer comments box on the order, set messages for shipping information, payments accepted, and a thank you message.
The "Email Notifications" page allows you to set which email addresses are sent notices of orders and what information is sent in the message. Credit card information is NOT sent via email. It is best to specify at least two email addresses if possible to assure that you receive the notification incase of a problem with one of the email addresses.
These can be configured on the "Email Customer Receipts" page. Here you can determine whether you want to have receipts automatically sent out and what to include in them.
The first four options on the setup page allow you to change the color, font, and graphics used by the cart to more closely integrate into your website.