Concepts - Online Storefront Customization

In-commerce online storefront is the actual website that your visitors see when they enter your URL in their browsers. There are several terms in the industry, used to describe this portion of the e-commerce software – front-end, public side, current theme, etc.  To avoid confusion, here we are going to refer to it as “online storefront” or “e-commerce storefront”.

E-commerce storefront is built from a set of templates, collectively called a “theme” (also sometimes called a “skin”).  As the administrator, you can create an unlimited amount of themes in your copy of In-commerce, however only one theme can be active at a time.  You can even create a selector of themes, allowing users to switch between them on the fly, or predefine specific themes – different Internet storefronts - for designated groups of users.

Our storefront software provides you with multiple ways of creating and modifying themes.  More specifically, there are three fundamental ways of customizing your online storefront –

• Customizing online storefront styles & colors
• Customizing online storefront page templates
• Customizing specific blocks and functionality

The easiest way to change the look of your Internet storefront is to change its styles and colors, something that you can do directly from the Administrative Console.  In-commerce storefront software operates with sets of stylesheets, which can be attached to the themes.  Each stylesheet defines a set of colors, fonts and other HTML attributes for various content blocks of the online storefront.  With a few mouse clicks in the Administrative Console, you can change the entire color scheme of your e-commerce storefront, by modifying the base styles.  There is no editing of templates or HTML knowledge necessary to do this.  More advanced users can add enhanced HTML attributes, or even work directly with the CSS file (each stylesheet corresponds to one HTML CSS file, stored inside the In-portal kernel).

A more in-depth customization of the e-commerce storefront involves modifying the template files.  In-commerce has two types of templates – page and block templates.  Page templates correspond to complete pages (or page types) in your online storefront, and block templates contain the content building blocks for these pages.  For instance, in the default theme, the home page of the e-commerce storefront is a page template, consisting of several content blocks.  You can edit the page templates, which look a lot like standard HTML with a few special In-portal tags, and move the content blocks around (simply by coping and pasting the tags in any text editor, or even online in the Administrative Console).  You don’t have to worry about breaking the functionality, and you don’t have to know anything about programming to do this.  Simply pick and choose the blocks that you want, and build your pages from them – like in a Lego erector set.

The most advanced level of customization, which shows the true power of our In-commerce storefront builder, is changing the block templates.  These templates contain HTML code and special In-portal tags, but they do not form complete pages like the page templates, only pieces of them.  The block templates are stencils of the entire e-commerce storefront’s functionality.  You can modify the behavior of the online storefront’s features, if you are comfortable with HTML and XML, and if you enjoy learning by analyzing the examples.  You can also study our library of the In-portal tags, along with the instruction manual, and ascertain all of the tremendous capabilities of our storefront software.  There are only a few dozen tags, so the amount of information is not extremely overwhelming, however it is important to understand the proper usage of the parameters and their values.  Your reward for all that studying will be the ability to change every little detail of your Internet storefront – from the product details to the checkout steps, customizing the storefront experience for your users exactly the way you want it to be.  The beauty of the In-commerce template system is that you don’t have to touch a line of PHP code or learn any complicated programming techniques to achieve this!

For more information about the storefront customization, please refer to our Online Storefront Customization white paper on this topic.