Not long ago we wrote about how you could manually add a My Account Link to your site, and today we’re going to review another useful link, but one that’s very easy to code incorrectly by accident…

The View Cart Link

With most websites pages it’s as simple as copying the URL to share a link with someone or to get the URL when linking to a page, but this doesn’t work with the Shopping Cart page of ShopSite.  The URL can contain extra data so simply copying it will not create the correct link.

For example, if you copy the URL when it has an “sbid” value in it (ex: “sbid=SSMSB1318363318.20917″) you are actually linking to your own shopping cart contents.  If a user follows that link and the cart contents are still stored on the server the user will see what you had in your cart at the time you created the link.

This is why you don’t want to just copy & paste the URL that you see in your browser.  However, it’s very easy to create your own link based on the following URL:

http://XXX.com/cgi-YYY/sb/order.cgi?storeid=ZZZ&function=show

Visit your online store and add a product to the shopping cart, then use what you see in the URL of your browser to fill in the XXX, YYY, and ZZZ values in our sample above.   For example, using our ShopSite Demo store the URL would look like this:

http://shopsite-demo.lexiconn.com/cgi-shopsite-demo/sb/order.cgi?storeid=*2036b3500d02b74177fc09496b178059b1cd&function=show

• Note: Be sure to fill in all 3 values and don’t forget the * at the beginning of the storeid.

That’s it – now you have a static view cart link which you can add to any of your pages or menus.