Michalke

Interesting contribution. From the videos it looks like it is all OSCommerce. Why should anyone pay you if they can easily set up there existing OSc-shop in Facebook themselves in a day?

Hi Maxemus This no third party app. This is my app and the contribution contains instructions how you can set up your own app using the products already existing on your shop. If there is any harmful code in your app, it is coming from you. YOU MAY NOT AND SHOULD NOT USE MY APP! USE THIS CONTRIBUTION TO INSTALL YOUR OWN FACEBOOK APP! The way I set up the app on our facebook page it displays products. I explained already to you that I have a contribution installed (Ask a question) which lets the customer get in touch with us. That is enough for us and we get lots of customers this way. I don't need a link to my actual site. But I agree, in your case it would be useless without a link to your site. I am not really sure if Facebook grabs any information about the customer when he is filling out my contact form. After all, it is running in an iframe.

Hi Maxemus, You are absolutely right. I am thinking about this too. One thing I noticed since I have my facebook business page installed with the OsC-app is that I get a massive amount of traffic on my site by Facebook. Browser: facebookexternalhit/1.1 ( http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php). So Facebook is checking out my site. This has most likely to do with the Like-Button installed on every product. I did that roughly the same time. Luckily enough, I have Header tags by jack_mcs installed on my real "shop", so I can give it the correct FB-own meta-properties. I am also lucky that I have square product images as Facebook only accepts those without cutting away parts of the image. Now that is nice. But the best thing is that I suddenly get found on bing which never happened before and never disturbed me before as Google has like 95% market share in Germany. So, the Facebook-Microsoft cooperation really pays off for me. That is of course probably because I have the like-button installed on every product page. But I agree with you. SEO on Facebook sucks. And it would be a good idea to have a link to the real site which boosts SEO. On the other hand I do not really want to confuse potential customers by leading them away from Facebook. I have not figured that out yet what to do. The Facebook shop does not have any SEO-boosting contributions installed like Header tags or SEO Urls. So it will probably never be found on Google. Maybe I will do that and rather have my products found on to different sites. Lots of thinking remains still to be done. :sweating:

Hi maxemus There is no second party app. It is like described in the contribution. I am the developer of the app. Look at the according facebook documentation: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/canvas and make your own app. The basic idea is actually very simple. I'm kinda glad that I do not have to deal with a payment module, though. Good luck.

Thanks Maxemus, It was really confusing me too and still is. Facebook has rolled out the new layout for fan pages on 10th of february and I upgraded to the new one immediately. Then Canvas resize stopped working. In Mozilla any longer product descriptions are cut off while on IE it shows a scrollbar. And suddenly the app is not longer called "Produkte" but "Sortiment". Some time in the past I called it Produkte and then changed it. I worked 10 hours to find out why. It is obviously a bug which has been reported by many facebook developers. So Facebook will continue to confuse us. I do not have a checkout installed because it is only used as a product catalogue. We have a busy physical agricultural warehouse and shop so this is only an add-on where I intentionally deleted the add-to-cart-button. I installed the contribution "Ask a question". That way we get in touch with customers, answer back with price and conditions and get like 1 order per day. When you install it as described you will have your checkout. Psychologically it is not a good idea to direct your customers away from one site. Probably better to do everything on facebook. Good luck.

Sorry for answering twice. Have a look at this: http://www.allfacebook.com/facebook-jazzes-up-admin-layout-tabs-and-navigation-2011-02, maybe the new facebook layout coming 10th of march lets you run your shop entirely as an iframe in a side tab. Of course there are width restrictions.

Hi ptt81, I had the same problem. My "shop" is heavily modified. I use v2.2 and kept an original OsC-download. I uploaded this clean shop in a subfolder and connected it to the existing stylesheet, images-folder and database. I then redesigned it according to the original layout. That took me like 15 hours. You would have to spent some time more to add the payment modules which I don't have. I am a selv-trained developer so everything takes a bit longer. Besides, I always try to make things myself. This way you have your existing shop untouched and probably save some money as Vendingbox probably charges some fees that eat into your margin. I had that in mind because we plan to make it a real onlineshop in the future when our companies internal organization allows it. So, just keep in mind that you have to possibilites with this contribution: you upload you existing shop or start from scratch with a clean one. FB is a pain to work with as they constantly change the rules and above all, keep everything badly documentated. If I can be of any assistance, just asked. Regards Michael P.S.: our customers are farmers and they are not really plentiful on Facebook, so this contribution was just a personal project.

1. This is tested in chrome, explorer and firefox in 3 different countries and by 8 people. I did not get this behaviour. There must be something wrong with your browser. Please be more specific. 2. I followed FBs recommended app settings: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/canvas. As I have quite long product descriptions it suits me because the 520 px narrow view does not provide enough space. Maybe you find something else that suits your needs better. Please don't hesitate to post that. Please stop this charade! Obviously you don't like this contribution so stop coming up with supposed flaws. I really want to help you but the communication with you is not very constructive.

You obviously do not understand how an iframe works. When you click on the first link in the narrow tab, that will be the static URL outside the iframe. It stays that way and will not change until you leave the whole thing. For gods sake try it out and see if the login button shows up and works or not! Or stop asking about the login button! When I have time I will set up a demo. Setting up a demoshop is surely more time consuming than installing the whole thing with an existing database. I am not a pro with databases.

Sorry for not having understood your basic problem the first time. This contribution gives you instructions to set up an external webpage hosting your onlineshop running identically to your existing shop within an iframe with a second URL which you cant see. As you do not have to make major changes to OsC itself there is no file included. An OScommerce-onlineshop usually does not require an SSL-certificate. Some payment modules might and yours has one. I don't know what your reasons where for doing it. I have no experience with SSL-certificates. I can't help you with that. What I suggested earlier is that there might be an easier way than what I wrote in the contribution concerning your SSL-problem or altogether. When you click on the "Produkte" tab on our facebook page you see it in the narrow 520 px wide window. Maybe you can use the fb:iframe tag to let your shop run in in an iframe on the tab. As soon as you click on some link in the narrow tab in my "shop" you get redirected to apps.facebook.com/koenigagrar/... It does so because I told it to do so in the configure.php of the second FB-shop. From there on you cannot use your SSL-certificate. From what I found from FB docs this is the way an app has to be set up. So if your shop cannot live without the SSL-certificate then this contribution does nothing for you. If you however can use your database, your product images and some of your payment modules without the SSL-certificate then you are good to go. You can try to change the settings in the second configure.php for HTTP-SERVER and HTTPS-SERVER and see what happens. I will try to set up a OsC-demoshop (with login-button) as soon as I have time. I use a contribution called "Ask a question" which also stores product id in the session URL, much like the add_to_cart-button. Believe me this works. Honestly, this took me three weeks, tons of coffee an cigarettes to find everything out and two hours to set it up. This is really simple and quickly done.

No, it has a shopping cart and all other OsC standard functions like login, create account etc.

Hi npn2531, Everything happens within the iframe. So the link to the shopping_cart.php on FB will show the shopping cart on FB and not link to the external OsCommerce shop. This answer of you kept me thinking for days. You are right there is not a lot you have to do to get this running, hence little to explain. The contribution as it is now, is perfectly working for me. The idea I have is probably a good one, but maybe still to complicated. I don't think it is necessary to upload the entire shop in a subfolder and make changes to the configure.php file. One could try to let the original external shop run in an iframe. Of course, there is the problem with the horizontal size restrictions of FB: 520px/760px width, that your shop or stylesheet has to cope with. Maybe some better programmer than I am can make this simpler.

I installed a new shop and did not upload the old one. There I had the buy button and it worked. I did not try if a payment module would work. It is an iframe. For what I know it is the only possibility to run an app on FB. You do not see which URL it is currently showing inside. The URLs inside the iframe are generating unique product URL strings as you are used to. Otherwise you would not be able to link to a product from index.php, product_listing, categories.php etc. The URL outside the iframe is static. Try to google "iframe tutorial" maybe you understand better how iframes work.

There is a product query string on the FB index page, as it is OsC standard index.php. It doesn't say in my contribution to redirect the buy button to an external page. I only suggested that to you, with your SSL question, not in my contribution. This contribution works with the buy button, but I don't need one. Not on facebook nor on our original site as you can see. It was actually so simple that I didn't know what else to write than two paragraphs. Well, my demo works for me. As soon as I have time I will try to set up a demo OsC-shop.

Here: http://www.facebook.com/koenig.agrar?v=app_157818144268807 it only displays products because I want it that way. Visitors can fill out a form and so get in touch with us. We get at least two customers per day. It works perfectly for us. It is an Oscommerce-onlineshop v2.2 where I deliberately deleted the buy button. I can easily make it an onlineshop buy just adding the buy-button. When you upload your onlineshop it will display the buy-button and everything else you want it to display. In the next days I will upload a demo version with the OsC-dummyproducts. Did you even try? Upload your own shop following the steps in the contribution and see what happens. Takes a couple of hours and you have a Facebook shop. It is up to you.

I guess it is as there is not much php coding involved. It runs on Facebook in an iframe, so why not.

Hi ptt81, when you got it working you mean you can call it like apps.facebook.com/YOUR_APP/index.php, or what? If you got your app running, try this FB documentation about how to integrate an app in pages where you are the administrator: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/canvas. Read all of it. The integration part for a page tab is quite at the bottom. Good luck. Please let us know if you get it done.

Hi npn2531, your shop is NONSSL until you get to checkout. From there you will have a problem because of the SSL. I only built one other OsC-shop with a payment module and that was clearpark which was run in an iframe. As an facebook app is running in an iframe already I don't know how this payment iframe would behave. My example shop for this add-on doesn't need a payment module. I don't see what payment modules you use for your shop. Do you have to use them with SSL? If you can use your payment modules without SSL then it should work. And, yes, it integrates my OsC into Facebook. We have over 600 products and these are all in one database and I use in both cases the same product image.

The first option is probably the easiest. Redirect away from one page is always a possibility to loose the customer. So maybe it works to let that payment module run in an iframe. As we don't need a payment module on our "shop" I don't really know. Just try. If you are a bit experienced it takes probably not more than a couple of hours to get your Facebook shop started. You can install the app first on your private page and see how it looks. Go to developers.facebook.com there you might find more informations about payment and credits.

You could let it run in an iframe or you could redirect the payment module from facebook to your real webshop. Or you could use on of the facebook payment modules. It does not take that much time to set all this up. Just give it a try.

For all who wonder how to integrate the created app into your business Facebook page, have a look at this link: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/canvas.

Hei, as I have said, we do not use it as an onlineshop, so no payment and no registration and no checkout.php etc. But I guess that should not be a problem, just try. It doesn't take that much time. Sorry, I am to much of a programmer greenhorn to answer your question properly.

Sorry, for not being so very clear. It is my first add-on. You have on your webserver folders like admin/ includes/ images/ ... and so on. You have identical ones on your machine. Then you create a new folder let's say facebook/ on the same level as the above mentioned folders on your machine and copy all these folders (admin, includes, images...) into this new folder "facebook" on your machine. You then upload the facebook-folder from your machine to your webserver so that you have admin/ facebook/ includes images/ ... etc on your webserver. The folder facebook then contains your webshop as is. Then delete all product images in the folder facebook/images. You only want to have them once. When everything works except your product images not showing up then there is something wrong with the images sti in the facebook/includes/configure.php. In the facebook/includes/configure.php we direct the images back to the original images folder not to have to upload them twice. I do all this to be able to redirect the URL in the facebook/includes.configure.php to http://apps.facebook.com/... which is necessary for Facebook to correctly display your app. There is probably some simpler way to achieve that. But this works for me. In the facebook/includes/configure.php file I point to the same database as the existing shop. So all stored information for your shop will be unique and not having to store and update everything twice. I did actually upload the original OsCommerce download to the facebook-folder. I have a heavily modified onlineshop that I expect to be getting me into trouble with the fickle Facebook. But just try. Hope that was of some help. If you run into troubles, I am always happy to help. Regards Michael

Sorry, didn't really think of that when writing the add-on. The app should automatically appear as a tab on your private Facebook page. There you can test it at least before you make it public on the business page. But you do not have to have at least 5 users or any other conditions fulfilled. To integrate it into the business Facebook page I followed these instructions: http://www.hyperarts.com/blog/tutorial-facebook-pages-with-static-fbml-application/

Thanks Nicolas! Fortune favours fools! I don't need the application to be in any other language than German. But it should be possible to make it available in several languages according to the Facebook users set locale. Look here: http://fbdevwiki.com/wiki/Locales#Getting_the_User.27s_Locale. Facebook actually offers translations with the fb:intl tag but so far I only saw few words translated correctly. You can go directly to my app here: http://apps.facebook.com/koenigagrar/index.php?cPath= Good luck! I will try to help if I can.