Frequently asked questions - F A Q

Complete shop or modul

Versions

Installation

What products can be customized with the product configurator?

What happens to products that are not customizable?

Customization & Extensions & Updates

Pricing of customized products

Product pictures & picture quality & picture upload

Artwork for an ordered product

 Minimum requirements of customers browser

 Minimum requirements of the server / webspace

 Licenses of product configurator and webshops

Complete shop or modul

The shirt configurator is an add-on module for online shops and you are able to install this modul
into your excisting onlineshop. Currently the following web shop systems are supported:

- xt:Commerce 3.0.x
- Gambio GX / GX2
- xtcModified 1.0x
- eComBASE 1.0x
- OSCommerce 2.2 RC2x
- ZenCart 1.2.x
- Joomla/VirtueMart 1.1.x

As also offer complete online shops with pre-installed product configurator. If you don't have an onlineshop
or you plan to install a new one, you have the choice between xt: Commerce, OSCommerce and ZenCart.

Versions

We provide two different versions of our product designer, a Business Edition and a
Professional Edition.

The Business Edition is capable for small and medium businesses with an average order volume, which
likes to offer customizable products in addition to their regular products.

The Professional Edition is capable for large print shop, which needs a comprehensive pricing for their,
products and a print-ready vector graphic of ordered products to safe time in production.

Installation

If you purchase our shirt configurator as a module for your webshop, you'll get a module package
with all files and an installation guide. The installation is extensive but programming skills are
not necessarily required.

Excluded from the manual installation procedure is the module for VirtueMart, because this
is using the Joomla own automatic installation routine.

We offer an installation service for a fixed price which you may order together with a module or
afterwards. You can also use this service for the installation of our updates and upgrades

What products can be customized with the product configurator?

For each product you are able to upload four pictures and for each picture you can set a printable area.
This means you can load any product into the product configurator.

As we originally programmed this product configurator for our own door and company signs production,
please understand that we do not sell the software to sign makers.

What happens to products that are not customizable?

You can offer customizable and regular products in you shop - trouble-free. Because you can activate and
deactivate the product configurator for each product and mixed shopping carts are no problem.

Customization & Extensions & Updates

Use the settings in the administraton to edit color and the size of the product configurator in frontend.
The color settings include the buttons, tabs and borders in the configurator. You can eaysily adjust
the configurator in the frontend to the template of your webshop.

We als provide some standard optional customisations such as:
- Exchange of the loading page or pictures in the product carousel
- Expansion or replacement of fonts (TTF fonts)
- insert another language (currently english, german, dutch, italian, french and serbian are supported).

Updates of our product configurator will take place regularly. They contain new features and Bugfixes.
By purchasing an update-ticket you will get all updates for a full year.

Send us your suggestions about features you miss or ideas to improve our product
configurator, we will consider them in the planning of future updates.

Pricing of customized products

For the pricing of products setting surcharges for each customisation feature,
is an important tool to cover the costs of production. Therefore, you are able to set the following agios*:
- for product pages to be printed
- used text lines
- used uploaded pictures
- used cliparts
- for each printing technology
- separate prices for each product size and allocation of block pricing

* features of the Professional Edition

Product pictures & picture quality & picture upload

In the product configurator (frontend) all product pictures are showing at a resolution of 450x450 pixels (if
the configurator use the default size settings of 770x620px).

You should upload cliparts as transparent pictures (PNG or GIF). Only then the customer has the possibillity
to change the color of a clipart.

When a customer upload his own picture it will automatically resized. But the original file will be saved on the
webspace and attached to the order, to provide the best quality for the production.
The server which host your webshop has some restrictions that take effect on customers uploads:
- If a customer upload a high-resolution picture the process to resize the picture will use more resources of the
server than a small picture. Especially the memory usage is important, because the php service has some limits
that could stop the process before it's finish. Therefore we limit the maximum resolution of uploaded pictures to
4000x4000px. If a customer uploads a larger image he will get informations how to proceed.

Other pricture formats than JPG, JPEG, PNG and GIF are not supported til yet.

Artwork for an ordered product

The Professional Edition has a feature to generate a print-ready vector graphic of the customized product.
If the customer used bitmap images in his product, these images will be integrated in the vector graphic.
So you don't need to manually import the uploaded pictures and cliparts into your vector program*.
Vector graphics could scale up to very large sizes without loosing quality, but uploaded (bitmap)
pictures may has a quality loss.

In the Business Edition you will see a new link in the order details (administration), after a customer
placed an order. This link opens a new tab with a flash preview program that is showing the
customized product and there you can create a screenshot of each side of the product.
This screenshot (jpg) will be integrated in a PDF which includes all text textlines, fonts, colors
and all clipartes and uploaded pictures (original).
You can import this pdf into a vector or graphic program* and adjust the objects into your
matrix. This intermediate step is necessary because you cannot use the screenshot for printing
the product.

* We test the vector graphic in the following programs: Corel Draw, Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape.

Minimum requirements of customers browser

The product configurator works independently of the operating system of the computer. The customer
shall use a standard browser with activated javascript and installed flash player (v. 9 or newer).
Keep in mind that apple products doesn't support Adobe flash.

The use of cookies is not necessary to customize a product with our product configurator, but may a
requirement of the webshop system.

Minimum requirements of the server / webspace

There are no special requirements to you webspace to run our software. Both php version (4/5) and
both mysql versions (4/5) are supported. Functions like GDlib and domxml are normally
activate by default.

The size of uploaded files, such as customer uploades or uploads of product pictures by the admin
depends on the server configuration. You will find the following important values in you "server info":

- upload_max_filesize limit the size (MB) of all uploaded files.

- max_execution_time set a time limit (seconds) how long a process runs until the server stop it.
Capture the screenshot and resize large uploaded pictures a processes which needs some time.
This value shouldn't be smaller than 100sec.

- memory_limit limit the memory usage of each process which is running on the server. Resizing
a large, colorfull picture may need much memory (50-150MB), so this value shouldn't be smaller
than 100MB

If it's necessary to edit this values (above), please contact your provider.

For customer uploads the values memory_limit and max_execution_time are important, because
the php service could stop the resize process before it's finish. Therefore we limit the maximum
resolution of uploaded pictures to 4000x4000px. If a customer uploads a larger image
he will see a comment how to proceed.

Licenses of product configurator and webshops

If you order one product configurator you will get a single license to use the software only in one webshop
or at one URL (domain). If you run several webshops at one URL (e.g with sub-domains), you can use the
software in just one of these shops. For each additional installation, you have to buy another license.

Due to a cooperation with a sign maker, we are committed not to sell the software to competitors
or to other sign makers.

Some of our products contains opensource webshop systems, such as xt:Commerce, OSCommerce,
Gambio, xtcModified, eComBASE, Zen Cart and Virtuemart. These webshop are GNU/GPL licensed,
in whole or in part and we don't sell this shops/files but provide them for free within our package in case
of an order.