Building a zen cart site? Here are some free buttons

One of the things that many people overlook in their ecommerce websites are the buttons. A quality, professional looking button set can add an extra dimension to a ecommerce web site’s design. Even if you have a great looking site template that you or your web designer has spent a long time customising to suit your business, if you have default buttons, inconsistent looking buttons, buttons of different sizes and colours or just buttons that don’t look that enticing, you could be losing potential sales without even realising it.

This is easy to fix by downloading a button set for your cart? The short answer is not necessarily – because downloadable button sets don’t always provide buttons for some of the popular add-on modules that people add to their cart.

To help solve this problem, we’ve put together an ecommerce button set for one of the popular shopping carts you can install yourself on a Geekz business web hosting package: zen cart.

This free zen cart button set comes in four different colours: black, green, hot pink and red.

The full list of buttons available in each file are: button_add_address, button_add_selected, button_add_to_cart, button_back, button_buy_now, button_cancel, button_change_address, button_checkout, button_confirm_order, button_confirm_send, button_continue, button_continue_checkout, button_continue_shopping, button_create_account, button_delete, button_download, button_goto_prod_details, button_in_cart, button_login, button_logoff, button_more_reviews, button_next, button_prev, button_read_reviews, button_redeem, button_return_to_product_list, button_reviews, button_search, button_send, button_send_a_gift_cert, button_send_another, button_shipping_estimator, button_sold_out, button_sold_out_sm, button_submit, button_TellAFriend, button_unsubscribe, button_update, button_view, button_write_review, search_small, small_edit

How to install the free zen cart button set

First download the button set that you want from one of the links below and uncompress them. They are saved as a ZIP file, which is the most common form of compressed file on the Internet. If you don’t have a program to uncompress these files, go to the Winzip website and get a trial copy of their Winzip program. This is a free trial and well worth buying at the end of your trial.

The buttons are in PNG format rather than zen cart’s default of gif so you will need to go into your includes/languages/english/button_names.php file using FTP and change all of the .gif file extensions to .png in order for these buttons to work. Once you have done that, to install the button set just upload these buttons in to the includes/templates//buttons/english folder of your cart to overwrite the buttons you have on your template. If you only want to use these buttons as the fall back buttons where you do not have your own template specific buttons, then copy them into includes/templates/template_default/buttons/english instead.

Free Zen Cart Buttons: Geekz Download Links

Red button set from Geekz
Black button set from Geekz
Green button set from Geekz
Hot Pink button set from Geekz

We will post other button sets on this blog in the future – if you’d like a button set for a particular cart that you are using do contact us and let us know your suggestion (current Geekz web hosting customers get priority in the votes).

Paypal: What is a PDT token?

If your ecommerce website is using Paypal to accept payments then in most cases the customer will be redirected to Paypal to make the payment and then back to your store once the payment has been completed. When the customer is returned to your store, all the website knows is that the payment has been completed; no other data is passed back by Paypal.

Adding a PDT token to your Paypal account allows your website to effectively become authorised with Paypal for a higher level of information disclosure after a transaction completes. PDT stands for Payment Data Transfer. Effectively, this means that when the customer returns you’ll not only be able to provide a thank you message, but also provide details of the transaction that took place on Paypal’s website.

Here is the flow of a PDT transaction, as shown on Paypal’s website:

What details can be sent back to the website from Paypal?

With a PDT token set up, the website can query the following information from Paypal following a successful return from a payment transaction: the first and last name of the customer, confirmation of the payment status, the payer’s email address, the currency they paid and the amount they paid.

If you are using a cart like oscommerce or zen cart, then a PDT token is essential to your cart’s successful use of Paypal. In other carts, it’s not essential but adds to the functionality.

How do you set up a PDT token?

• Go to Paypal and log in.
• From the main screen once you are logged in, click on the White link “Profile”. Make sure you click on the link and ignore the drop down menu that appears when you hover over the word Profile.
  
• A screen with a lot of link options appears, in the third column choose “Website Payment Preferences”.
  
• Turn on both Auto Return and Payment Data Transfer (PDT) token settings. See the screenshot below. Then click save and your PDT token is created.
  
• You’ll now be back on the home page for your Paypal account. Click Website Payment Preferences again and scroll down the screen to see your PDT token. Save this to Notepad as you’ll need to enter it in to your shopping cart application like Open Cart, Zen Cart or osCommerce in the appropriate place.

It’s not essential to use a PDT token but if your website does it can display more meaningful results. The issue comes when you have multiple websites requiring a PDT token on the same Paypal account – as there’s only space to enter one return URL on the above mentioned screen.