Linking to Your Store

Your "online catalog" is your online store. You can access it from the Administration console by clicking the Online Catalog link in the upper-right corner.

Your visitors can access your store in a number of different ways.

Direct URL

Your visitors can access your store directly on the Web using the URL:

https://yoursecureurl/yourdomain.com/merchantmanager/

You can find your secure URL in SiteControl.

Link on Your Web Site

You can add one or more links to your store to your existing Web site. Use the format:

<a href="https://yoursecureurl/yourdomain.com/merchantmanager/">Visit our Store Now!</a>

Automatic Redirect

You can configure your site so that when visitors access http://www.<yourdomain.com>/store, they are automatically redirected to your Merchant Manager storefront at https://yoursecureurl/yourdomain.com/merchantmanager/.

The advantage of setting up this redirect is that you can distribute a URL that is easier for your customers to remember.

To set up a redirect:

1	Create a basic HTML page (using Notepad, Microsoft FrontPage or another tool of your choice). If you are not sure how to create an HTML page, you can download the existing index.htm page from your domain and then delete everything between the starting and ending <HTML> tags.
2	Between the starting and ending <HTML> tags, insert the following code: <META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh"CONTENT="0; URL=https://yoursecureserver/yourdomain.com/merchantmanager/">
3	Save the file with the name index.htm.
4	Using FTP, FrontPage or another file transfer method, connect to the/store directory on your domain's Web server and upload the index.htm file you created in step 3. Be sure you are uploading this to the /store directory.
5	When visitors go to http://www.yourdomain.com/store they will be automatically redirected to your Merchant Manager storefront.

Because your Merchant Manager store resides on a separate ecommerce server dedicated for just this purpose, you will not see a /merchantmanager directory in your /www directory on your Web server.

This configuration enables you to use your own SSL certificate for both your Web site and online store. A shared SSL certificate is provided to you automatically.