Magento Cart is a very adaptable, open source ecommerce shopping cart platform that is widely used and well supported by a large community. Magento is especially adapted to an ecommerce site with a large array of products. Magento is written in PHP language and uses MYSQL database, the same platform as RTD itself.

The model we are presenting which combines Magento with RTD is by no means the only way to accomplish such a task but we believe it is a very good marraige, employing the strengths of each of the two products. If you find other ways to accomplish the same, we'd be glad to hear from you. The basics of our model are:

1. Magento is used for a catalog and cart
2. RTD is called for design using a “Design It Now” button placed in Magento
3. RTD Design thumbnails and price calculations are pushed to Magento cart
4. Transactions are handled through Magento Cart
5. A bridge is used to link login data so that users see the solution as seamless

Each of these aspects are discussed in greater detail below.

A standard Magento installation is required aside from the RTD. We recommend you choose a hosting company that is already supporting Magento users. There are several references for Magento around the web if you need more information. Basically, your installation will include a product in Magento for each and every product you wish to design in RTD.

The first step to combining Magento and RTD is to insert a “Design It Now” button within your magento site. While this could be done by inserting a button image and HTML links for the RTD directly into your Magento product descriptions, we chose a bit more complicated method that creates a live link to your RTD products so that rather than manually copying and pasting the links, you can simply pick the product from a dropdown list and the link is grabbed via the RTD API. Our site contained an extensive array of products. A little bit more work up front means considerable time savings down the road. If your Magento product offering will be limited, perhaps the simpler, manual link placement will be fine. Details for our method are here:

Our model uses the RTD to calculate pricing. We found that Magento was far inferior to RTD for calculating the complex array needed that defines pricing of custom printed products. Once the user finishes his RTD design and clicks submit, you'll need a way to send this information automatically to RTD - both design and pricing information. This is done by using the RTD to “format” the data in a particular format and “teaching” Magento how to recieve that information. The RTD part is done using the EXTERNAL NOTIFICATION process which basically sends a formatted file to any web address that you instruct it to. You enter that web address as well as which data elements are to be passed into the EXTERNAL NOTIFICATION screen as shown HERE.

Magento by itself would not know what to do with the formatted file sent by RTD. A “bridge” is created by installing a PHP computer script called processing.php. This script tells magento where to place each piece of data sent by RTD. After the user clicks submit for the RTD design, the data is sent to Magento which processes it and displays the cart view with that item added to the cart. Users then continue shopping or checkout through Magento as they desire.

The procedures above are adequate to complete RTD online design through Magento but does not address the issues encountered by Registered Users. If you have disabled this feature, nothing more is needed. If you desire to use the Registerred Users features of the

RTD and Magento you should consider linking the login info for both. This gives returning visitors the ability to see what they bought

before and recall previous designs. Without linking the logins, your users will be faced with a seperate login for each system which

may prove clumbsy. To create the link for user logins you will need to install the following script. Be sure to edit the login credentials coded into the file to correspond with your RTD account.