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; however, Squirrelcart Pro includes extra features provided by Pro modules that are normally sold separately.
The list below is a very brief summary of our product and category features. You'll find more detailed information in the sections listed throughout this page.
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.
* = included in Squirrelcart Pro
Automatic categories are special categories that display products without you having to add them to the category.
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.
Customers have accounts all over the web. Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc...
With our new social sign-in feature your customers can login using accounts they already have.
They'll have one less username and password to remember, and will be able to login faster than ever, increasing the chance that they may order.
Click Here for a Live DemoProduct Options allow your customers to make choices when adding items to their cart.
You don't need to know HTML in order to add form fields for gathering information from your customers, so they can choose options for products they wish to order.
Squirrelcart will automatically generate the HTML needed for you, to show options using any standard HTML form field type, including: select, checkbox input, radio input, text input, textarea, and file input fields.
With the add-on products feature you can assign products to another product as "add-ons", using the related products feature.
Improve your sales by letting your customers add an item and related items to the cart in a single operation.
You can create just about any kind of discount you can imagine, using our discount features and our rule system.
Squirrelcart has a powerful rule feature, which allows you to specify when to offer a discount. You can target a discount based on user information, group membership, past orders, the current order in the cart, date, coupon code, etc...
When specifying values you want to match against, you can also use regular expressions. You can combine rules and conditions to offer just about any discount scenario you can think of. For example, you could actually offer this crazy discount if you wanted to:
Offer 20% off when coupon code 123ABC is entered, between May 1st and June 15th , when the user is in the "Special Customers" group, and they spent at least $500 in the past 180 days, and their last name ends in an "s", and their current order is over $250, and doesn't weigh more than 50 lbs.
You would never need a discount like that, but it does demonstrate how much control you can have.
Many of our customers are SEO experts, using Squirrelcart for their e-commerce clients. Why? Because we understand the importance of SEO, and have added several features to help your pages rank well.
You have full control over the page title, meta description, and meta keywords for all store pages, including: product, category, search, checkout, account, order history, content, module, and other pages.
Squirrelcart automatically adds the correct metadata fields and tags to your pages, so search engines and other systems can understand them.
Open Graph is an open protocol created by Facebook. It is a standard which allows you to add additional meta tags to a page to aid other systems in understanding that page.
When Open Graph meta tags are present on a webpage and you share that page on Facebook, Facebook uses those tags to help determine how to handle that page. By adding Open Graph meta tags, Facebook can better handle your pages. While created and used primarily by Facebook, it is also used by other systems.
Schema.org Microdata is an open standard similar to Open Graph. It is used by many search engines and other systems. This is Google's preferred means of specifying metadata. Using Schema.org Microdata on your pages will help Google and other sites better understand your pages.
When enabled, Squirrelcart will automatically add the correct Schema.org Microdata to your pages, using a combination of <meta/> tags inside the <head/> tag of a page, and tag attributes throughout the page.
This is how Google interprets Squirrelcart product pages with Schema.org Microdata enabled, and our Reviews module installed:
Twitter Cards, according to Twitter:
Twitter Cards work much like Open Graph, via special <meta/> tags.
Query string URLs are used by most scripts, to tell the server what action is being performed. They look like this: http://www.example.com/store.php?crn=154&rn=87&action=show_detail
Query strings in URLs are difficult to read, have no meaningful words or phrases, and don't help you understand the page being linked to.
Our SEO URL feature solves this problem. It removes query strings from category and product URLs and replaces them with search engine and user friendly keywords:
http://www.example.com/books http://www.example.com/books/gone-with-the-wind http://www.example.com/about-us
The words used in the URLs can be customized. We call these bases. By default, the bases are generated automatically based on your products, categories, and other records, however, they can be customized to suit your needs.
Pages may have a few different URLs that point to the same page, for filtering results, sorting, changing page numbers, tracking affiliate links, etc...
This may cause search engines to treat those page variants as duplicate content. To prevent this, Squirrelcart automatically sets a canonical <link/> tag on these pages, pointing to the correct master URL for these variant URLs.
For example, if you are tracking add clicks to a product page via a custom parameter like adclick, you may want to send a customer to a product page like this so you can track the ad click via your web statistics software:
If this page is indexed by a search engine, it looks just like the version without the adclick parameter and looks like duplicate content. For the above example, Squirrelcart will automatically add this link to prevent that from happening:
When viewing a category or when viewing search results, if more products are available than will fit on a page, that page may contain page navigation links to navigate to other pages in the data set.
Search engines may see these pages as duplicate content. To help search engines understand pagination, Squirrelcart adds rel="prev" and rel="next" links:
Squirrelcart keeps track of every value you specified as a base for your products, categories, and other content. When you specify a new base, the old base is stored in a log. If the page is requested using the old URL via a bookmark or a link in a search engine, Squirrelcart will automatically issue a 301 redirect to the new URL.
This helps humans get to the correct page, and also lets search engines know that the page has moved.
There are too many features in the storefront to list them all here. However, this is a small subset of some of the components you'll find in the default storefront page. You can create your own navigation blocks and content to add any additional HTML you like.
Squirrelcart can track the number of units you have in stock, for both products and product options.
When an item is out of stock, you can set a store-wide out of stock message. If you want to get more specific, you can specify custom out of stock messages for individual items. This can be used to let the customer know when an item will be back in stock.
Squirrelcart can restock when you issue a refund, delete an order, or assign a custom order status.
Squirrelcart stores information via MySQL, the world's most popular open source database.
Customers, products, categories, store settings, shipping options, payment methods, and orders are all stored in the database, for fast and efficient access.
With the backup tool in the control panel, you can create database backups, and restore using them should things go awry.
Export data from any control panel table view, in comma separated (.csv), Microsoft Excel 2007+ (.xlsx), or Microsoft Excel 2003-2007 (.xls) format.
Squirrelcart can send several different emails, all of which can be turned on and off, and can be customized using our control panel and template files.
Squirrelcart can send emails using SMTP (with or without authentication), PHP's built-in mail() function, or sendmail.
With our automatic email feature, you can set up custom personalized automatic emails that can be sent to users and to staff when certain events occur.
You can automatically send emails when an order is placed or updated with a status, and when a user is created or added to a group.
With our rule system, you can further refine when an email is sent. It is possible to send an automatic email for just about any scenario you can come up with.
Examples of when you may want to send an email:
Some of the features:
Users can specify whether they prefer to receive HTML formatted or plain text formatted emails. This feature can be turned off at your discretion.
We have built-in support for all couriers, with powerful tools like real-time rate lookups, tracking, shipping label creation, address validation, and more.
Squirrelcart is partnered with Endicia.com to give you full access to generate USPS prepaid shipping labels, along with access to many shipping tools to aid yourself and your customers.
Squirrelcart is certified to work with FedEx® Web Services, via the FedEx® Compatible Solutions Program.
We are a UPS Developer Kit Approved Provider. Read about our UPS Developer Kit integration.
When you create a shipment in Squirrelcart, a shipment notification email is automatically sent to your customer. (can be disabled if preferred)
Group locations into zones, by country, state, city, postal code, or postal code range. Create your own zones, or use our built-in zones.
Use zones to control anything in Squirrelcart that already uses our ruleset feature, including: shipping, discounts, downloads, payment methods, order fees, etc...
Built-in zones: Domestic, International, US - Contiguous States, US Census Bureau Zones, UN M.49 country regions.
With the cart persistence feature, your customers can keep items in their cart for days, weeks, months, or as long as you like. Carts are stored in the database for safe keeping, preventing lost sales, and making all sorts of nifty things possible.
Squirrelcart can handle the following types of payment.
If you are going to take credit cards for payment, you will need to use a payment gateway or payment processor. Squirrelcart supports most popular payment systems.
With this feature, you can restrict the use of payment methods using our powerful rule system. This can be useful for when you want to offer a payment method, but only under certain conditions such as order total, group membership, etc...
After an order is placed, Squirrelcart can help you fulfill and manage it with our order management features.
You will receive orders in your inbox, in HTML or plain text format. They look just like they appeared to the customer when they placed the order.
Orders can also be viewed in the control panel.
Select multiple orders, and print them all in one shot to save some serious time.
You can track the state of an order using our order status feature. It allows you to assign a status to an order which is marked with a timestamp. The status indicates where the order is in your fulfillment process at any given time.
We have several built-in order statuses, such as payment pending, payment received, approved, shipped, refunded, etc... You can also create your own custom order statuses to suit your specific business needs.
You can edit orders in the control panel, to adjust address information and totals.
Assigning a status of shipped will automatically trigger a shipment notification email back to the customer, with a tracking number if one is available.
Customers can see the status history of their orders on their order history page. If you have an order status that is for internal use only, you can hide it from your customers.
With our active carts feature, you can see live orders as they are being placed, just as the customer sees them.
Our order statistics page shows a breakdown of sales (along with shipping, tax, handling, etc...) for each day of the month, the last twelve months, prior years, and for the current month across all years.
You can drill down by clicking on a year, month, or day, to drill down to the next level. You can even see a breakdown of orders by hour for any given day.
When you want to work with stats offline, you can export them to .CSV or .XLS files.
We take security very seriously, and always write code with security in mind. Squirrelcart passes all PCI scans. Any vulnerabilities that may arise in Squirrelcart are patched as quickly as possible (usually the same day they are reported to us).
If you suspect that a problem in Squirrelcart may have been used to cause a problem on your site, or to gain unauthorized access, notify our support department as soon as possible and we will help.
All security patches are available on our Downloads page to all users regardless of their download status. They are located in the section labeled Security Patches.
We offer a security mailing list that you can join to receive important security announcements.
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:
* requires a module, included in Squirrelcart Pro and sold separately for regular Squirrelcart
On the server-side, Squirrelcart is written using PHP. Our PHP code is neatly organized, commented, and not encrypted. If you are a PHP developer, you have access to the actual source code, which you can modify to suit your needs. Please keep in mind that we only technically provide support for modifications to template files, though you have the freedom to change whatever you like.
We use MySQL for our database engine.
Having valid HTML and CSS is important. It helps ensure cross browser compatibility, reduces layout issues that may be due to mistakes, and ensures your content can properly be crawled and indexed by search engines.
If validation is important to you, you can't have valid code if you start out with a cart that doesn't validate!
Our HTML validates as HTML 5 transitional.
Our stylesheets validate as CSS 3.
We make proper use of browser caching, compression, and file size optimization to speed up page loads.
All storefront CSS and JavaScript is contained in separate files that are linked to using <link> and <script> tags, for faster load times (via cache) and better SEO.
While we have several CSS and JavaScript files behind the scenes, when served to the browser they are done so using only one <link> tag and one <script> tag. This improves performance, as only two server requests are needed to load all of our CSS and JavaScript. This reduces the number of requests made to the server, which improves page load times.
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files are served using compression, which dramatically reduces the total size of the page request.
Here's the total request size for the homepage of our demo store (as of this writing).
Squirrelcart's back end administration section has been designed for ease of use. We've spent countless hours making it as simple and intuitive as possible.
You can search from directly within the menu, for products, categories, orders, and users.
Quickly access the most recently edited products, categories, orders, and other records directly from the menu.
If you are logged in as admin and want to edit a product, category, or other record, you will see an edit link near the item in the storefront. Clicking the link will take you right to that record in the control panel.
On save, you are returned back to the store. This makes it very quick and easy to make changes.
Products, categories, and other items in the store are edited using forms in the control panel. Most field names are self-explanatory. For a field that might need some explanation, you can hover over the label to get instant help.
Squirrelcart includes a rich text editor, to edit fields that accept HTML. With the editor in design view, you can create HTML for use in the store without having to be a web developer. Use the editor to change fonts and colors, add links, images, bullets, check spelling, etc..
If you have HTML skills, put the editor in code view and you can work with the HTML directly.
With our record actions feature, you can perform actions on multiple records with a single operation.
If you get a phone call from a customer that wants to place a phone order, you can easily login as them from the control panel. You can then head to the storefront and place an order for them, update their account info, check their order history, etc...
Order and customer records in the control panel include a map showing the location of your customers, via Google maps.
Squirrelcart is not just a shopping cart, it is also a content management system. You can use it to run your entire website, or just your store.
Squirrelcart creates your product, category, and checkout pages for you. With our CMS features, you can create other pages as well, and edit them in our control panel. You can create additional pages like About Us, FAQ, Privacy, or any other pages you might need.
Our content records use the same rich text editor found on your product records, making it easy to write HTML without having to be a web designer.
Content records are used by Squirrelcart to display different elements of the store. We have several built-in content records to display things like categories, best sellers, featured products, etc...
With the same feature, you can add your own custom content to your store home page, edit it, and control where it appears.
Navigation blocks, which are located by default on the left and right side of the page, are used by Squirrelcart to display links and other elements. Squirrelcart has several built-in nav blocks to display things like categories, cart options, account options, etc...
With the same feature, you can add your own custom nav blocks to the store, edit them, and control when and where they appear.
With our links feature, you can manage your links, organize them for display in certain areas of your store, link to external pages, and more.
Squirrelcart uses themes to control the appearance of the store.
Themes contain individual templates, stylesheets, and images that define the appearance of your store. By changing your theme or its settings, you can completely change the way your store looks.
Squirrelcart comes with a built-in theme that gives you incredible control. We've added support for 10 different layout styles in four different widths, complete control over colors, shadows, borders, corners (square, rounded), CSS3 linear gradients, CSS buttons without images, support for web fonts via @font-face declarations, and all sorts of other stuff.
There are now 15 variants to control various aspects of the design. Once you narrow in on something you like, you can tweak it further with loads of new settings. Change the button sizes, fonts, colors, corners, gradients, etc....
Try it now!If you are a web designer, you have full control over the design. Squirrelcart can be made to match any design you can come up with.
The pages Squirrelcart generates for the store can be customized using our template and CSS files. You can change your fonts, background colors, all of the cart images, location of certain components, etc....
Our template files are PHP files, containing mostly HTML with some PHP mixed in. You don't need to know PHP to customize our template files.