Features
There are so many features built into Squirrelcart that it is difficult to list them all on a single page. If you are looking for a particular feature, and do not see it here,
please contact us via email .
Squirrelcart and Squirrelcart PRO have the same standard features. Squirrelcart PRO includes features provided by PRO modules that are normally sold separately.
Product and Category Features
Unlimited number of products and categories
Unlimited number of subcategories, nested as many levels deep as you like
Products can be marked "not for sale", which keeps them in your database, but does not display them in your store.
Upload images for both products and categories via the cart
Advanced Image Features - autogenerate, resize, mirror, flip, rotate, and crop images.Support for HTML or plain text in Product and Category descriptions
Control product sort order on a storewide and per category basis
Control the number of products seen per row and per page, on a storewide and per category basis.
Support for adding multiple items to the cart from a single page
Automatic Categories
Automatic categories are special categories that display products without you having to add them to the category.
New Products - displays products considered new, using a setting equal a number of days you specify.
Best Sellers
All Products
Purchased Items - this category displays all the items that your customer has ever purchased for fast re-ordering.
Add-On Modules (included in Squirrelcart PRO)
Squirrelcart can be extended by installing one or more add-on modules. All modules marked with * are included in Squirrelcart PRO for one discounted price. They can also be added to the regular version of Squirrelcart by purchasing them separately.
*Contact module - to facilitate communication between you and your customer. This provides a contact form, support for vCards, and much more.
*Slideshow module - provides a tool in your Squirrelcart control panel to create interactive image slideshows. Use it to create slideshows showcasing your products. Slideshows can be placed in a Squirrelcart Content record, Navigation Block, or template file. They can also be embedded on any web page using our embed code, even if the page is not part of your Squirrelcart store.
Store and customer service feedback via our *Testimonials module
Customer reviews and ratings via our *Reviews module
Send newsletter emails, and post news on your website via our *News module.
Instant price totals on product detail page without adding item to the cart, via our *QuickTotal module
Offer downloadable merchandise (software, e-books, etc...) via our *Download Delivery module
Customers can find your locations using our Store Locator module .
Access Restrictions
Control when and if customers have access to your store, categories, and products. You can also control what happens when they do not have access.
This feature is great for sites that need to sell via wholesale, or for any other stores that require restrictions.
Feature to require login in order to access the store
Restrict access to categories and products via group membership
For restricted products, you can either hide them, show them with no pricing, or show then with pricing but without access to purchase.
Product Options
Product Options allow your customers to make choices when adding an item to their cart. You can use them for:
Simple choices like "size" or "color" (example)
Gather text for engravings, gift cards, etc (example)
Charge per character entered. Optionally charge for spaces if needed.
Completely customize an item (such as a computer system)
Add optional extra items (example)
Gather image or other files from your customer to customize a product. (example)
Variable price options allow your customer to enter the price they want to pay. This can be used for donations.
Options can be shown in storefront as
text,
textarea,
select,
radio,
checkbox, and
file fields.
Options can be marked as required (customer must choose an option in order to purchase item)
Options can alter the price and weight of a product (add or subtract)
Options can also set the price of an item (example: A recording offered on DVD for $19.95, or VHS for $14.95.)
Squirrelcart can add a link that will open a popup detail page describing an option, and it's choices. If you add images for your choices, they will appear in this page. It's a great way to show detailed information describing the option and it's choices.
Our inventory control feature allows you to track your stock at the option level (example)
You can add quantity fields to your options, for a customer to specify how many of each option they want to order.
Tooltips can be added to aid your customers in choosing options.
Text and textarea options have a minimum and maximum character setting. When used, the character count is displayed as the customer types via Javascript.
Discounts
You can create just about any kind of discount you can come up with using our Discount feature and condition system.
Apply discounts to 1 or more products, categories, or the entire order
Quantity based discounts "Buy 2 get 1 free" type discounts
Discounts can be applied to an order based on any combination of the following conditions:
You can combine the conditions above into complex formulas to fine tune your discounts. For example: offer discount when (Date is between 10/15/2006 - 11/15/2006 AND Product total is more than $50.00) OR Coupon Code is "ABGT5S29"
Advertise your discounts on a product page (example)
Display discounts that customer is receiving below checkout form OR as a popup page .
Discount Badge Feature - Discount badges are images that are overlayed on top of your product images to indicate they are on sale.
They can be shown on product thumbnails . They can also be shown when viewing a product's detail page .
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Features
Storefront Components
There are too many features in the storefront to list them all there. This is a small subset of some of the components you'll find in the default storefront page.
Inventory Control
Keep track of your stock, for your products AND product options
Fine control over what your customers see when an item is out of stock:
- Display item as out of stock, and allow customer to purchase it
Completely Database Driven
Customers, Products, Categories, Store Settings, Shipping Options, Payment Methods, and Orders are all stored in an fast and efficient MySQL database.
Backup tool in control panel to backup your database
Export data from any table/view in Comma Separated (.csv), Micrsoft Excel 2007+ (.xlsx), or Microsoft Excel 2003-2007 (.xls) format.
DB History tool in control panel - to show changes made to your database during upgrades
Query tool in control panel for direct queries (recommended for advanced users)
Email Features
Squirrelcart can send emails using: PHP's built-in mail() function, sendmail, and SMTP (with or without authentication)
Emails can be sent in HTML format, text format, or both
Customers can choose their email format preference
Email order receipt to customer. (example)
Email order notice to merchant. (example)
Email shipment notice to customer
Email upon account creation, to customer
Email upon account creation, to merchant
Forgot password feature - emails password to customer
Send newsletter emails, and post news on your website via our News module. (sold separately - included in Squirrelcart PRO
Shipping Features
FedEx® Compatible - Lighthouse Development has completed the FedEx® Compatible Solutions Program. Squirrelcart is certified to work with FedEx® Web Services.
Click here for full details .
- There is no additional fee to use the FedEx® tools
UPS Developer Kit Click here for full details.
- Your customers can track their packages in your store front
USPS Web Tools - your customers can get live USPS rates from USPS.com without leaving your site
Canada Post Sell Online support - to obtain live rate information
Australia Post real time rates
Custom Shipping Couriers and Methods can be added
Shipping is rule based, which allows you to offer 1 or more shipping methods, based on:
- Weight of order
Full support for changing weight and dimension units, with feature to convert all weight/dimension field values from in to cm, lbs to kgs, and vice versa.
Automatically create shipping labels behind the scenes, the moment your customer submits their order (for UPS and FedEx).
Automatically print thermal labels that were created during checkout, to an IP based thermal printer. This will result in the label being printed the instant the customer completes their order!
Order Fees
Apply handling fees at the item and/or order level
Assign an unlimited number of additional fees to your orders. With our powerful ruleset feature, rules can be assigned to control when a fee is charged. You can add fees based on location, past orders, group membership, date, and much more
Sales Tax
State / Province based tax calculations - specify which states you charge tax in, and percentages associated with them
Specify whether or not to tax products at the category, or individual product level
VAT (Value Added Tax)
VAT support for all 25 EU member states.
Specify whether or not to tax products at the category, or individual product level
Specify which rate type should be charged for a given product or category
Support for VAT exemption - to allow exempt companies to not be charged VAT by entering their company name and VAT registration number at checkout.
VAT registration number format validation - to ensure that the VAT registration number entered is formatted correctly
Order Management
Customers can view their order history in detail
Merchant can specify status of order in control panel
Merchant can customize entries for order status
Order statistics - displays order sales totals by year, month, day, and hour
Active carts feature allows you to view orders in progress from the control panel, just as the customer sees them.
Sales Agreements
Agreements can be shown at checkout, on the account form, address form, and product pages.
Sales agreements assigned to products will appear on the payment page OR on the product page, depending on your configuration.
Security Features
Supports Secure Socket Layer. SSL is a communications protocol that enables Squirrelcart to send order information in a secure manner to the payment gateway you are using.
Information the cart needs in order to maintain the flow of the application is temporarily stored on the web server using sessions, not using cookies.
Minimum username and password length is customizable
User Friendly, Intuitive Administration Interface
Squirrelcart's back end administration section has been designed for ease of use. We have emulated the feel of a desktop application, to help ease the merchant into learning the details of the cart. Navigation is done via drop down menus that are very similar to those seen in non web-based applications. Many of the field names listed on the records in the DB are links that you can click on to get help for the particular field you are altering.
Payment Methods
The cart can handle the following types of payment.
Credit Card
Electronic Check
Check
Money Order
Purchase Order
PayPal
Google Checkout
Amazon Payments
Custom
For a full list of payment gateways, see the section below.
Payment Gateway/Processor Support
If you are going to take credit cards for payment, you will need to use a Payment Gateway or Payment Processor. Squirrelcart supports the following:
CMS (Content Management System) Features
In addition to a shopping cart, Squirrelcart can also be used as a content management system!
All record fields that support HTML can be edited via a rich text editor , making it unnecessary to know HTML in order to make your strorefront content look like you want it to. If you are an advanced user and prefer to not use this editor, you can disable it.
Create your own content, which can be displayed on your storefront page or linked to as separate pages. That content can be edited using the rich text editor mentioned above.
Control what and where content appears on your storefront's home page.
Control what navigation blocks appear on your storefront page, create your own, and reposition them.
Create your own links to built in Squirrelcart pages, products, categories, content, and custom URLs.
Highly Customizable
Here are some of the ways to make the cart fit the look of your site:Templates:
Just about every piece of content that Squirrelcart generates for the customer's browser can be easily configured via template and CSS files. You can change your fonts, background colors, all of the cart images, location of certain components, etc....
Themes:
The template files mentioned above control the look of your entire store. All of the template files the cart uses collectively make up a theme. You can create your own themes, or use one of the ones provided with the cart. If you wish, you can give your customers the ability to change the appearance of your store with a single click by changing the current theme on your homepage.
With theme variants, you can slightly change the appearance of your storefront without changing the overall design of a theme. This is useful for creating themes that come in different colors, or optimized for certain monitor resolutions.
For more information on customizing Squirrelcart, please see our How to Customize Guide.
Behavioral settings:
Emails to merchant and customer - turn them on or off.
Billing and shipping address fields- Modify what fields are shown, and what fields are required on the address information pages.
Authorized Hosts - Specify which websites can add an item to your cart. Defaults to just your domain, but can be altered for special circumstances
Minimum Username Length
Minimum Password Length
Forgotten Password Limit (number of times someone can try to submit their email in order to obtain a new password)
Currency Symbol
Change field name that products are sorted by, as well as sort order
Change number of products that are displayed per page
Add to Cart Behavior - allows you to specify what happens when a customer adds something to their cart. You can either stay on the product page, or go directly to checkout. Both options display a notice at the top of the page as to whether or not the item was added.
Force User Creation - allows you to force customers to create an account before they can finish placing an order
Human Verification
We support reCAPTCHA for ensuring that forms are filled out by humans and not by spam bots.
The following forms can be enabled for reCAPTCHA:
Account Form
Forgot Password Form
Review Form
Testimonials Form
Code Details
Storefront validates as XHTML 1.0 transitional
Storefront CSS validates as CSS 2.1
All storefront Javascript and CSS are contained in separate files for faster load times (via cache) and better SEO.
Storefront pages delivered via compression for faster load times
3rd Party Script Support
The following 3rd party scripts are built into Squirrelcart and can be enabled/disabled as needed.
reCaptcha for human verificationSlimbox - a lighter weight clone of a popular script called Lightbox. You can read more about it here . It is used to open an image in a popup that is not a separate browser window. This provides the benefit of working regardless of popup blocker settings. The script also grays out the rest of the page to give emphasis to the popup being viewed.
FCKEditor - Rich Text WYSIWYG editing for Product & Category descriptions, as well as other description fields in the control panel - via FCKEditor
UniTip - Squirrelcart has a tooltip feature to display information related to certain items when you move your mouse over them. We use the UniTip library by UnitInteractive.com for this feature.
Unit PNG Fix - to fix alpha transparency PNG support in IE 6.0
Google maps - automatic display of a Google map on control panel and order records, showing the location of your customer.
