Hi Scott, you mean the only way to upgrade is to call your office?. In the future to upgrade from Shopping Car Creator Standar to Pro will we have to call or is gonna be automatic? I'm just a little beat worry about. Thank you

We are not sure yet how the process will be since the software has not been released yet

After a few hours of auditioning both the Basic and Pro versions over the weekend, I opted to use my 25% off coupon code to purchase the Pro version. Without the discount reducing the cost of the Pro tool down closer to the Basic, I'm not sure that I would have found the difference between the two applications to be significant enough to warrant the extra expense.

However, I'm a 'tweaker', in that I like to have as much control over things as possible. Even though I'm just getting my feet wet with the Shopping Cart Designer, I know that there will eventually be something I want that can only be done in the Pro version.

My opinion is that Basic is more suited to those who use WYSIWYG tools, such as Visual Site Designer and rely on supplied or purchased themes, rather than 'rolling their own'. Of course, this is a generalization and everyone's mileage is likely to vary.

That stated, kudos and thanks to CoffeeCup for the Shopping Cart tools. I've played with Zen Cart in the past, and even though I had some success, the learning curve was quite steep, and teaching it to the owners of the shop I built with it was a nightmare...

It's probably worth noting that SCD Pro gives you maximum control, not total control over the look & feel of your cart. If you're like me, you're always going to find something you can't change, even with the most advanced and capable tool in your toolbox.

(Waiting *patiently* for SCC Pro!!!!)

I think you'll be very glad you opted for the Pro version cbrillow, it's quite a bit more versatile with a whole lot more settings than the standard version is. Enjoy!

Yep -- I had to look at the big picture. Over time, I usually delve deeply into the more obscure and advanced features of software I use. So, even if it's overkill initially, it's better to have unused capability than to wish for more when it's finally needed.

Don't have any such uncertainty about SCC Pro, though. Need it NOW!!!!

I totally agree. I have recently bought the basic cart and built a website with restrictions.
I'm now working on getting the site on to the search engines with the help and advice from the pros
but can't follow some of there advice ie editing tags etc.
Do I wait for the Pro version to be able to do this or go with cc's HTML editing software.
Don't particularly want to learn html but do want this website to be up there with the stars.
Any suggestions?

So I started with the basic cart and knew nothing.
Now I know more and can't do what I want to do.
Moto: Better to buy too much than not enough.

Disclaimer: I've only been using this software for a very short time, so I might have well missed seeing what you need.

My humble opinion:

Although you can add HTML to your shopping cart pages, there's nothing that I can see in either version of Shopping Cart Designer that will make it easy -- you'll have to hand-code it. I don't see a way to include meta tags inside the header, which is where they need to go. You'd probably have to do that outside of Coffee Cup, after designing the cart or shop.

A lot depends upon whether you use the your shop's Home as the actual home page of your site, or if you have an existing website with a link to your shop. If you have to jury-rig something into an existing page of Shopping Cart Creator's output, you'll have to add that code every time you change your shop. If you add it to your 'regular' home page, it will remain independent of the shop.

To make this a little clearer, imagine that I have an website called 'widgets.com', and I want to add a shop to it using SCC. I build the shop and upload it to my server, and put a link to it on my home page.

The original website lives at 'www.widgets.com' and the shop created by SCC is found at 'www.widgets.com/shop'. SCC is responsible for all of the files in the shop folder, and I have free control over my homepage, which is www.widgets.com/index.html. It is in that file that I include tags for search engine optimization.

Doesn't mean you can't do it within the Coffee Cup app, but I imagine that it's a lot less straightforward to pull off and would get pretty messy.

All this is leading up to: I think the safest thing to do would be to obtain the HTML Editor and do your work with that, and to put the meta tag keywords in your index.html file rather than trying to fiddle around in SCC's output.

You can add meta tags in shopping cart creator. On each of the "pages" on the right hand side there are two boxes towards the bottom, one for your meta description and the other for your meta keywords.

So no need to resort to anything else

"You can add meta tags in shopping cart creator."

Great! Thanks for the clarification! Since this was in the SCD forum, I replied thinking mainly about it -- didn't remember seeing it in there.

Always happy to be corrected.

It can get confusing knowing which program does what...but if you remember...as Jo Ann will verify that SCD is just for design and the SCC is for all your input.