Storefront 5.0 and Storefront 6.0 Customization

I spend a lot of time customizing LaGarde's StoreFront shopping cart software. My major client is still using StoreFront 5.0 so I make many improvements to its Merchant Tools. The best improvement I've made is to replace the product description textbox with a HTML Textbox Editor from the Community Starter Kit. This allows me to edit product descriptions in a What You See Is What You Get editor. I have also created a script to export the StoreFront 5.0 products for a Froogle product feed.

I have added a script to export all the customer e-mails as an Excel spreadsheet which opens in the web browser.

I wrote a script to make it easier to look up customer records. StoreFront 5.0's Merchant Tools used many drop down lists for the selection of records to edit. This worked fine for a new StoreFront web but as the database grows the drop down lists begin to take forever to load.

StoreFront 5.0 used some very inefficient database code which eventually causes significant performance problems. The database code is creating a recordset of thousands of records just to add one new record. I have written some stored procedures to replace this inefficient database code and that solves the checkout problems that older web sites often experience as their database grows.

I also reproduced the entire My Account and Order History features introduced in StoreFront 6.0 for StoreFront 5.0 which really needed customer self service.

I have the XE version of StoreFront 6.0 so I have all the source code and project files to customize a StoreFront 6.0 web in Visual Studio 2003. StoreFront 6.0 is a huge project which uses many specialized classes so customizing its functionality is a highly technical skill which requires considerable expertise.

Storefront 6.0 Customizations

1. Change required fields for Address Book
2. Enable Credit Card Verification code without online processing
3. Disable order tracking
4. Add database table and Merchant Tool section for entering holidays
5. Establish search results display order
6. Establish product attribute display order
7. Add Gift Message field in addition to Special Instructions
8. Eliminate Thank You pop up
9. Make Zip Code a required field
10. Validate Zip Code
11. Add Special Instructions or other fields to Email Confirmation messages
12. Add Merchant Tool page to show customer record count, product record count, and subscriber record count. Surprisingly, this information is not provided by the datagrids the Merchant Tools uses to manage these records
13. Apply fancy web design to StoreFront ASPX files without using the limited design options.
14. Create new user controls for horizontal navigation.