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Good Evening!

It's not often that I drink coffee at 10pm on a week night, but this is no ordinary night. Tonight is a special night. The kind of night that makes you want to wear special pants and sing songs of your elders. The kind of songs that have long beautiful kazoo solos that loop endleslly upon themselves in a whirling pattern of amazing-ness. I have not slept in THREE DAYS! It is time for ...

Squirrelcart v5.0.0

Version 5 is mobile friendly and looks great on smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops!

responsive screens

Theme improvements

Responsive web sites use a single design that adjusts according to the size of the screen. You can now make your store look and work great on any size device.

Some of the features

  • Header buttons to show navigation, cart, and account menus.
  • Responsive width option can be set to standard or wide (fullscreen).
  • Built-in touch-enabled homepage slideshow. Use it to show images and content slides on your homepage, with links to products, categories, or other pages. (no module required)
  • New depth options to control shadows and gradients including a modern flat option
  • New webfont options for body text, buttons, and titles
  • New form header options that make use of web icon fonts
  • New nav block and content title styles
  • Converted many storefront fields to new HTML 5 field types: email, url, phone, date, number. This causes mobile devices to vary the keyboard when typing best suit the field.
  • New mobile responsive theme passes Google's "mobile friendly test", and gets a 100% score on their "Mobile User Experience" PageSpeed insight test.
  • Many more improvements to the appearance of the store
  • Improved handling of product options

Modal dialog boxes

Modal dialog
Storefront modal dialog boxes to help prevent unnecessary page loads and improve user experience. Used for:
  • Displaying options when clicking "add to cart" from product thumbnail view
  • Displaying product option detail info
  • Prompting user to view add-on products
  • Empty cart confirmation
  • Credit card security code help popup
  • Order status info and order notes

Product option improvements

Images for options can now be displayed on product pages via a touch-enabled carousel. Clicking any image will open it in a modal popup to view more info.

Products that have options can be added directly to the cart from category pages. When add to cart is clicked, options are shown in a modal dialog making it faster and easier for customers to order.

Option Improvements

Major Image improvements

Product Extra Image Carousel

Extra images now appear via carousel feature (Owl Carousel), in two different modes. Swipe or drag to navigate through images, with auto play and lazy load options. Extra images

  • New "Auto Size" feature - when enabled, you will see only one primary image field for product and category records in control panel. Different sized images are automatically created on save. This makes it easier to manage your images, and keeps images in the storefront looking consistent.
  • Retina image support for high pixel density screens (like iPhones and new smartphones and tablets)
  • Slimbox replaced with new lightbox script (Magnific Popup), which works on all devices.
  • Frame image feature to make non isolated product and category images look nicer. Can be turned on and off storewide, and for individual records.

Shipping Improvements

Endicia - Postage Paid USPS Labels!

Generate postage paid USPS shipping and return labels, track shipments, check rates, schedule pickups, validate addresses, buy postage, and more... This is a big improvement over USPS Web Tools in that you can generate and pay for labels without going to the post office.

Shipping Estimator

Shipping Estimator

We've added a shipping estimator tool to the "view cart" page. This allows customers to check and select rates before entering their full billing and shipping address. This can lead to an increase in sales, as some customers are not willing to enter their address info without knowing their total.

More shipping features

  • Fastway Couriers API support (Australian shipping courier)
  • Shipping rates can now show as "TBD" (to be determined).
  • Products can be flagged as shippable (or not)
  • Storefront shipping feature (estimator, shipping address form) are hidden automatically when no shippable products are being ordered.
  • Changed service sort order for FedEx rates during checkout. Lower rates now appear first.

Address form improvements

Autocomplete addresses with Google Maps API

Autocomplete

Customers can autofill their address info as they type using Google Maps Javascript API.

This is free for most merchants.

Need help setting this up? We can do it for you for a small fee.
Contact us for more info.

More details:

  • Forms make better use of screen real estate
  • Address forms in store only show states that corresponding to the selected country.
    (for states entered in the control panel)
  • Updated state and country records
  • Much more...

Human verification improvements

Updated to reCaptcha v2

reCaptcha v2

This is much easier to use than to the old version.

Other Improvements

  • Image file upload product options can now be restricted to certain dimensions
  • Many other storefront and control panel appearance improvements
  • Products now have a new "Summary" field to display a short amount of text first, above your product options. The full description is shown lower on the page.
  • Feature to enter email address for "skip address" option on account choice page. This helps gather user's email address as soon as possible, making it available to merchant under "Carts" for possible follow up of abandoned orders.
  • Added support for jQuery.
  • Many performance improvements, reduced memory usage, faster page loading

For a full list of changes, see our version history page.

How to get this version

Squirrelcart v5.0.0 is now available for download on our Downloads page, to all customers with active download access.

You can check your download access status here.

Has your download access expired? You can renew it for an entire year for only $85 USD by purchasing a Download Renewal.

Switch to Squirrelcart Pro

If you are a regular Squirrelcart user, you can change your license to Squirrelcart Pro for the difference in price. For a comparison of the two versions, see this page. If you'd like pricing or more information, just reply to this message.

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Thanks!

This version was a massive undertaking and I can't tell you how thrilled I am to be releasing it. I hope you like it too. Please share your feedback with us on Facebook.