Shopping Cart Creator generates all the files you need to run your online shop, which means it can be used as a standalone website. Additionally, the Pages tool gives you the option to add up to five custom webpages to your store. These can be used as a shop homepage, a FAQ, a refund policy page, etc.

However, if you already have a preexisting website, you can easily incorporate your online shop. This is a two-step process:

Step 1: Uploading Your Shop
When you upload your shop, you’re going to need to tweak your normal FTP settings slightly. This is because you want to upload your shop to its very own subfolder. You get to name this subfolder whatever you want — we recommend using a name like "shop" or "store," but it’s up to you.

How do you create this folder? Well, that depends on your hosting provider, as well as your remote folder. The most common way to create your shop's subfolder is to append your remote folder with /subfoldername. Subfoldername is the name of the subfolder where you want your shop to be stored. Here are a few examples:

public_html/shop
www/store
/webshop

If you’re still unsure of what exactly to put in these fields, or if you’ve tried these options and your shop still isn’t uploading correctly, contact your hosting provider. Ask them what you should do to upload your files to a subfolder.

Step 2: Integrating Your Shop
The first step can sometimes be a little tricky, but you’ll be happy to learn that the second step is as easy as creating a link on your webpage. If you’re using an HTML editor such as CoffeeCup HTML Editor or the code editor in CoffeeCup Direct FTP, you’ll use this HTML:

<a href="Shop URL">Text you want to appear as a link</a>

• Shop URL is the URL for your shop. You can use a relative or absolute link. For more information about relative versus absolute linking, read this article: Absolute vs. Relative Paths/Links.
• Text you want to appear as a link is the linked text your visitors will click on. "Read this article" in the preceding paragraph is linked text.

If you’re using Visual Site Designer, create and highlight the text or object you want to make into a link, and then click the Link button in the Toolbar. Check the Use Link checkbox, make sure the WWW radio button is selected, and enter the URL for your shop in the WWW field.

If you’re using menu-building software, such as Flash Menu Builder, you can create a new menu button and link it to the URL for your shop.

Unsure of how to determine the URL for your shop? No worries, it’s not that hard! If you appended the name of your remote folder with the name of your shop subfolder, it's as simple as http://www.yourdomain.com/subfoldername. Here are a few examples:

http://www.mywebsite.com/shop
http://www.mysite.com/store
http://www.mydomain.com/webshop

If you contacted your hosting provider and they gave you a super-complicated method of adding a subfolder, you might want to ask them how to easily find your shop URL.

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