I have shopping cart creator and designer pro along with a multitude of other coffee cup software programs. I am fairly inexperienced with web design and was wondering if there is a function to have users able to create accounts that track their order history and enable easier signing in for them. I also wanted to know how I can put advertisements from other companies on the web page to start earning revenue. I have not seen any options in the software to add these.

P.s: I have not put my shop online yet. The time is coming soon. I am just trying to get fully prepared for when the time does come to implement these things.

Hiya John,

The programs for Shopping Cart do not have any type of login system at all, nor will they as they are not actually saving any information on a permanent basis other than inventory calculations. When a customer purchases from your shop what happens is they are redirected to the payment gateway you have setup such as PayPal or Google Checkout etc. That is where they enter any pertinent information, use their credit cards or PayPal accounts and no information is actually gathered to the shop software itself for the customer.

The reason that information is important is because there is no "tracking" of the customer data done on your shop site so there'd be no way to do this with the shop as it is.

Having said that, yes you probably could use databases, heavy scripting if you have all that knowledge, but it would take a lot of hacking and hassle to do so. The Shopping Cart Creator program is designed to get a shop up quickly and more important "easily" for the novice site user having little to no site building experience. Granted some experience is helpful, but it's still setup to be able to do this with little to none. Because of this, it's as basic as needed to keep people from getting too messed up in settings and logins and government code requirements etc.

So pretty much the answer is no, you are not able to do logins and track customer sales with the default software, but if you have some major programming experience, or know someone that does, then yes you probably could hack it in there with a lot of effort.

Hey John, As far as your question about advertising...if you are looking for some way for clients to 'buy' and ad on your site and have it appear, then I have no idea. I know it can be done.

If, on the other hand, you simply want to 'take an order' for an ad, then create the ad yourself and install it, that should be pretty easy. Look here: https://www.facebook.com/#!/Laughingbird.Software?fref=ts

You should see a button for 'FREE SOFTWARE' under the timeline. Get it, it's great! With that you can create a pretty spiffy ad in no time, save it as a transparent png file and add it anywhere on your website you want. Just monitor how long the ad runs and delete it when you want.

If you want to use 'banners' to advertise I would suggest another program, but it would cost you some $$. Let me know if that is where you want to go. You might also want to look for a FREE php banner rotator script. Hope this helps.