Every E-commerce website, (your internet store), gets this amazing shopping cart. A shopping cart allows your customer to choose and pay for products from your website.
The shopping carts the features are amazing. To explain what a shopping cart is, it is a website that allows customer to choose products and have them all put into an order. They then get a total of the order and can pay instantly from the website.
If you would like to see a real e-commerce enabled website so you can see what your customer will see, click here. Your store will not have the link at the top to the MyShoppingPlace.com mall.
This store is selling aromatherapy products. Of course when you install your store will be selling your own products. We assume you already have something to sell.
Here are features your customer/shoppers will see when using your E-commerce website:
1. Every customer can have their own account so when they return or re-order they just enter their password. This saves then from re-entering all their information every time they order.
2. The customer can choose to activate a cookie so that they are remembered when they return to the website.
3. The customer can choose to subscribe or unscubscribe as they please to your newsletters.
4. The customer can change their name, address, email address, phone, password, etc. from their admin page anytime they like.
5. The customer can see their order history and the status of each order, received, pending, or delivered. This lets them know how much longer before they receive the order.
6. The customers can write reviews on your products. This encourages other customers to purchase your products.
7. Customer can view your products by catagory, search by key words, or choose by manufacturer.
8. When customer first logs in they see your newest products.
9. Customer can add, edit, and delete the items they put into their cart.
10. Customer can choose to see your website and prices in 3 different languages.
11. The customer can see pictures of each product, and click to enlarge the picture.
12. Your customer can see any future products you may have coming out.
13. Your customer can see if your products are in stock. This is good if you are selling a product with limited amounts. If for example you have 50 of one product, once there is 50 products ordered the customer will be told you are out of stock.
14. The customer has a personal address book. This is in case they want to have products shipped to friends as gifts. The customer orders and pays for the product, and then when they click on shipping options they pick which friend to have the product shipped to.
Here are features for you as the shopping cart owner
As you look through your cart you should know that when you see the i mark it means you can click and get more information, 1 means yes and 0 means no.
You get a private website that is password protected for managing your store.
You can see an example store of how your administration site for your mall store will look by clicking here. This example store is not a real store so do not order anything from it. Also, your store will not have the link at the top to the MyShoppingPlace.com mall.
Inside your administration website:
Under ConfigurationThis shopping cart is part of an open source project so future improvements will be amazing. As such, any fees we charge you are not for the actual code of the shopping cart itself. We only charge you for hosting your website, marketing, chat, and other services.
1. My Store. Here you control your email address, your store name, the owners name, country, time zones, the order you want things to sort with, and several other features.
2. Minimum values and maximum values. You should leave as the default.
3. Images. This changes the sizes of your images on your store. You can just leave it as default.
4. Shipping/Package. This tells your cart information needed about your shipping location etc.
5. Product listing. Choices on how you want your products to show on your cart. You can just leave this as the default..
6. Stock. This will tell your store when and how to notify your shoppers about levels of inventory you have on hand. You can just leave this as the default also.
7. Logging. This tells your store how to show you information about visitors to your store. You can just leave this as the default also.
8. Cache. Just leave this as default.
9. E-Mail Options. Just leave this as default.
10. Download. Just leave this as default.
Under Catalog
1. Categories/Products. Here you can add categories for products. After you have created a category just click on the yellow folder to see what products are in that category, or to add, delete, or edit a products.
To edit a product, click on the product name, then click on Edit. You can then say if the product is in or out of stock, or the day it will be available if out of stock. You list the manufacturer, and if you like you can put the name and description of the product in English, deutsch, or spanish. You can put them all in English if you like.
You then put in how many products you have in stock. This will automatically inform your shoppers if you are out of stock of an item, as the cart will keep track of how many items have been sold and how many are left, based on the number you say you have in inventory.
Next you can upload an image for your product. This is done easily by just clicking on the browse button and finding the image you want on your home computer.
Then you can choose to put in a URL to the manufacturer of your product. This will show a link by the product of the website that provides more info. You can choose not to use this also.
Next you enter price and if this is a taxable product.
2. Products Attributes. Here you can add an option drop down box to your products. For example if you are selling shirts in large medium or small, you would make an product option here and give it an ID. Then when you enter a product you can add the ID of this option.
3. Manufacturers. Here you can create categories for all the manufacturers of your products. This way your shoppers can search your products by manufacturers.
4. Reviews. Here you can manage reviews of your products given by your shoppers and customers. This is a very good feature to encourage other shoppers to buy from you, if your customers give you good reviews. Here you can delete any reviews you don't want on your website.
5. Specials. Here you can run any specials you like on any of your products. Just put in the special price and the expiration date and your cart will do the rest.
6. Products Expected. If you have any new products coming out, you can list them here and put the date they will be available. This way your shoppers can come back later, or even order them now and wait for shipment.
Under Modules
1. Payment. Here you can decide what type of payments you will accept, paypal, authorize.net, C.O.D., check/money order.
Paypal is automatically secure. If you use authorize.net you will need a merchant account and pay to have a certificate and secure set-up. Unless you have about $500.00 to do this now, we suggest you start with only the paypal feature.
Paypal allows you to accept credit cards from customers. They do not have to join paypal to pay you if you upgrade your paypal to the business level. All these services at paypal are free, except a 3% charge of sales they process.
We also suggest you accept the check/money order method also. This allows your customer to mail you the money. Of course you do not ship products until you receive payments.
2. Shipping. Here under status click on red to activate the type of shipping methods, and green to activate. You can click on the ! to see more info.
You can pick flat rate to charge just one fee no matter the size of the order. Or you can choose and edit per item and table rate.
If you choose united parcel or united states postal service the shopping cart will automatically check the cost for shipping on the order at the usps or ups website, and put that amount into the cost of the order.
Zone rates allows your cart to calculate shipping costs according to how far away the customer is.
Under Customers
1. Customers. This will list all the customers that have ordered from your store. By clicking on the customers name you can see when they created their account, see total amount of orders, send them an email and modify their account.
2. Orders. This will show you all orders from your mall store. Here you can see if the order is pending or shipped and modify that status.
Under Locations / Taxes
This allows you to set tax rates and zones. Under Localization
This allows you to set currencies and languages for your area. Under Reports
1. Products Viewed. This will tell you how many each time each product in your store has been viewed. This will let you see the interest in each product. If you notice one product has a lot of interest but very little sales, this will give a hint your offer or presentation needs adjusted.
VALUABLE TIP: Keep watch on which of your products are being viewed. Keep replacing products with small amounts of views and keep improving the descriptions of your products with higher amounts of views. This feedback will eventually give you more products with more views.
2. Products purchased. This will tell you the top 4 products actually purchased.
3. Customer orders. This will list your top customers according to dollars by purchase.
Under Tools
1. Database backup. This shows you the directory your store is being backed up to.
2. Banner Manager. Here you can allow your banner or anyone else's banner to display at the bottom of your shopping cart. You can allow it to expire on any date or by how many impressions it receives.
You can view how many displays and clicks each banner has recieved. This is great for exchanging banners with other websites.
3. Cache Control. Leave as default.
4. Define lanuguages. Leave as default.
5. File manager. Leave as default.
6. Send email. Here you can send an email to any specific customer or a group email or newsletter to all customers that have subscribed to your list.
7. Server Information. This will give you information about the actual server your website is being hosted on.
8. Who's Online. This one is pretty cool. It tells you how many people are looking at your website at that moment. If any of them have allowed cookies it will even tell you their name. You could click on their name and get their phone number and call to see if they need any help shopping. Or is that too spooky?
There are no charges for the shopping cart code itself.