About MetaCart Free

Overview
Hardware/Software Requirements
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 website. 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 based on Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) technology hooked to a Microsoft Access 2000 (*.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.

MetaCart Free is designed for manual processing of orders.

Hardware/Software Requirements

To use MetaCart Free, 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, Windows 2000 Server with at least IIS 5.0 or Windows Server 2003 with IIS 6.0.

You will also need a good website design and HTML editing program (such as FrontPage 2000 or 2002, or Visual InterDev 6.0), and Microsoft Access to create your own database or to edit the one that comes with the application. MetaCart Free was developed on a Windows platform and the demo on the MetaLinks.com site is hosted on a Windows 2000 Server.

For MetaCart Free to work properly on your personal computer, you will need to have one of the following operating systems: Windows 98 or Windows NT with Microsoft Personal Web Server and Windows NT Option Pack 4 installed (you can download the option pack from Microsoft's website); Windows 2000 Professional with IIS; or Windows XP with IIS.

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.

Additional Installation/Setup Instructions

Additional installation and setup instructions, as well as the End-User License Agreement, are included in the README file, in the MetaCart Free download package. Use of MetaCart Free is governed by the terms of this Agreement. The coded pages also contain instructions for modifying the application.

NOTE: The README file also 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 hosted server, and connecting to the database. Please read these instructions carefully.

Support/Add-Ins

MetaLinks.com provides limited installation and setup support via e-mail only for MetaCart Free. Should you discover any bugs in the application, please notify us so we can post any fixes to our master download file.

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