This page includes the comprehensive list of details for the NeuCart Shopping Cart System.
For a more detailed description of features,
check out the features page.
General Information
General Information
- Open Source Software
- Uses PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and AJAX technologies
- Minimum requirements for the installed version: PHP 5.0, MySQL 4.0, GD Image Library
- Simple site navigation. Customers always see the shopping cart!
- Mobile-friendly display for mobile device browsers like iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.
- Customers never leave your site while shopping! They are redirected to PayPal only as the last step of checkout for PayPal purchases.
- Product search by category, text search, or both. Text searches include both the title and the description of the product.
- Auto-suggested search results can be presented to the customer as they type.
- Special product types include "Featured Products", "Top-Selling Products", products that are "Coming Soon" and "New Products".
- Choose the product list style: standard grid listing or a more Amazon.com-like listing with a product description.
- Configure custom URLs for products with easy-to-remember URLs.
- Multiple images allowed for each product.
- Customers can view "enlarged images" for more visual detail.
- Product description allows unlimited text. Description can include HTML or other markup.
- Allows for embedded Flash Player (or other HTML widgets) for customers to sample digital products before buying. (Flash Player not provided by NeuCart.)
- Displays a suggested sales list: "Customers who bought this item also bought..."
- Built-in HTML5 audio support to easily provide audio samples for your products
- Built-in "Album" Players: easily create a widget that plays multiple tracks, provides links to the tracks for those other products, and allows ordering of the mp3 and/or sheet music right from the album player.
- Built-in support for third-party audio or video widgets. Just paste the code into the configuration for a product. Widget location is configured automatically without HTML knowledge.
- HTML5 and/or Flash Player (or other HTML widgets) can be superimposed over product images on product list pages. Allows a customer to sample multiple songs without jumping from product to product
- Simple configuration for HTML5 audio: just upload the audio file and set the HTML5 audio name of the file
- Automatically emails small digital files to customers (like sheet music).
- Provides secure digital downloads for larger files (like MP3s).
- Multiple files can be downloaded for a single product.
- Configurable options to determine the number of file download retries, the time a customer has to access downloads, and the locations from which a user can download the files.
- Configure MP3s to be tagged with the order number and/or the customer who placed the order.
- Configure PDFs to display a watermark that includes the order number and/or the customer who placed the order.
- Store option determines of customer account behavior: account required for checkout, account created during checkout, or accounts not needed at all.
- Store option allows customers to skip address fields for orders containing only digital items.
- Customers can create multiple addresses, change password, or request forgotten passwords.
- Customers can view their order history.
- Customers can opt in/out of newsletter lists.
- Store option determines if you will allow customers to leave product reviews.
- Configuration options allow you to control:
- If customers must be logged-in to leave a review.
- If customers must have purchased the product before leaving a review.
- If reviews are displayed automatically or if they require administrative oversight.
- The number of days until a review is automatically uneditable.
- The method for displaying the ratings stars (always display, never display, or only display if there is at least one review).
- From the Admin portal, you can create and send newsletters to your customers:
- Send to all customers.
- Send to customers in specific "Newsletter Groups" that you configure.
- Send to customers in specific states or provinces.
- Send to customers in specific countries.
- Send to customers who bought specific products.
- Send to customers in a radius, like "50 miles from Chicago" or "90 kilometers from Paris".
- Customers can add themselves to your newsletter from your store.
- Newsletter emails provide secure unsubscribe links for customers to opt out of future newsletters.
- View statistics on your newsletters: see how many customers are subscribed, see how many customers received a newsletter, and see how many customers unsubscribed from your list after receiving a specific newsletter.
- No tech knowledge (HTML, PHP, MySQL, etc.) required for general maintenance of your store. Intuitive administrative experience.
- Easy to add, edit, and delete: Products, Categories, Coupons, and other record types
- No limits on the number of products, categories, coupons, or other types of records
- Bulk editing for many record types, including bulk price edits for products and bulk "marked as shipped" edits for orders
- Create multiple accounts for users to be store administrators
- Documentation provided to explain how features and functionality work, and the best ways to configure certain features
- Your store's software version is displayed along with the current version available at NeuCart.com and the list of software changes.
- Ability to hide configuration pages that you do not need or no longer use.
- Bulk Image Converter tool: upload all images at once and let the software convert them for displaying on the site.
- PayPal (encrypted or unencrypted)
- Credit Cards through Authorize.Net
- Google Checkout
- Offline Payments (for delivery restaurants, for example)
- Hooks to allow custom payment types
- Flatrate per product
- Dynamically calculated using UPS
- Dynamically calculated using USPS
- Dynamically calculated using Canada Post
- Hooks to allow custom shipping calculations
- "Offline Payment" type for customers to submit orders online and pay later
- Configurable delivery times
- Configurable delivery dates
- Delevery Location selections: if your store services only a regional area, turn this on for customers to select on of a few towns/locations, instead of typing the entire city/state/zip information.
- Digital file uploads and image uploads all handled from within the Admin portal.
- Create categories and subcategories for your products.
- A single product can belong to up to four categories.
- Bulk editing for product category, quantity and price fields.
- Create new products by copying an existing product.
- Create product option lists, like Size and Color. Create the lists once and assign to multiple products.
- Product options can be priced or unpriced
- A single product can be displayed on ordering pages but represent multiple SKUs for back-end reporting; for example, Small/Medium/Large options for an item called "Shirt" can make the sale report as one of the specific items, "Small Shirt", "Medium Shirt", or "Large Shirt".
- Mark a product with special attributes like "featured", "Coming Soon", or "New Item".
- Determine the delivery type for each product: shipping required, email, or download.
- Allow users to type instructions for a product (autographed, etc.).
- Configure "Coming Soon" products to be available for purchase or not.
- Determine "Out of Stock" behavior for products: allow them to be ordered, do not allow them to be ordered, or hide them from customer view.
- Option to display the inventory count for specific items, including the ability to change the message text at a specific item count threshold. (For example, the store can display "20 items left" but can later display "Only 10 items left!")
- Associate META Tags for each product
- Associate specific thank-you messages for each product if necessary.
- Set start/end dates for coupon availability.
- Set the number of times a single coupon can be used. (Available to the first ten customers, for example.)
- Configure coupons as "percent off" or "amount off".
- Configure coupons to apply to the entire transaction, to individual items, or to be "advanced coupons", like:
- When the cart reaches $50, shipping is free.
- When the cart contains four tee shirts, shipping is 50% off.
- Buy one CD, get another CD at half price.
- Buy four CDs, get any two songbooks at 50% off.
- Determine coupon behavior: affect shipping and/or taxes, allow other coupons, and limit coupon to one use per customer.
- Apply coupons automatically based on transaction details. (Requires some custom code)
- Option to use "Basic Checkout Mode" for stores that only accept PayPal, and that do not need to use tax/shipping settings, customer logins, or shipping addresses.
- Option to display or suppress the coupon entry field during checkout.
- Display options determine site behavior: number of items per page and per row, the default items to display, and requirements related to customer login.
- Thumbnail image size can be determined by you, the store owner. Most examples cited on this site are of other sites with the default thumbnail image size, but it is configurable.
- Option to ensure that customers cannot over-order: during checkout, the inventory within the store can be checked versus the quantity of an item in the customer's cart
- Configure email addresses used for sending password reset instructions, sending newsletters, sending order confirmations, and delivering digital files.
- Configure the text that displays in order confirmation emails.
- Configure the Thank You page text that displays for completed orders.
- Configure the email address within your organization that gets notified of completed orders.
- Order notifications to the store include the customer's name, address, payment type, and the order description. The order notification email breaks the order down by product type: emailed files, downloadable files, and physical files.
- Configure the countries and/or states that require taxation.
- Configure PayPal settings: return/cancel URLs, encryption settings, and technical settings.
- Step-by-step documentation provided for setting up encrypted PayPal payments.
- Support for Authorize.Net refunds
- Search for orders by customer name and order status.
- View and set an order's shipping status.
- Send order shipping/tracking information to customers.
- View and set an order's ledger status. The order page displays the PayPal fee associated with the order, so you get a true representation of your profit from each sale.
- Mark an order as "shipped" without logging in to the Admin portal. The email notification to the store includes a link to click to update the order.
- Sales Reports
- Low-Stock Item Reports
- High-Use Coupon Reports
- Reporting framework designed to allow PHP-knowledgeable users to create their own reports easily
- Import customers from an existing CSV list
- Export functionality: Total Sales, List of Orders, List of Item Sales, Customers
- Google Product Feed settings to export your inventory to your Google Merchant Center
- Associate META Tags for each product
- Create Marketing Partnerships to give other companies commissions for referring traffic to your website.
- Pay all Marketing Partners at the same time, using PayPal's Mass Pay functionality.
- Marketing Partners can log in to the Partner Portal to view their commissions earned and payments received.
- Google Product Feed settings to export your inventory to your Google Merchant Center.
- Configure META tags for the store pages and for individual products.
- Configure "friendly" URLs for your products to enhance search engine visibility.
- Configure "friendly" URLs for your categories to enhance search engine visibility.
- Options to resolve links to the canonical name all the time, and to remove extraneous URL parameters to always provide "clean" URLs.
- Hook provided for custom tax calculations
- Hook provided for custom email notifications to the store
- Hook provided for custom payment types
- Hook provided for custom shipping calculations
- Hook provided for after-shipping calculations, allowing dynamic calculations to be modified, for example, with floor or ceiling values, or to add a fixed handling charge.
- Hook provided to allow editing/adding/removing shipping types from the list that displays to customers. This hook is used when the customer gets to choose the type of shipping from a list of providers.
- Hook provided for automatic coupons. You can create any rules necessary to apply coupons automatically based on conditions you provide (like day of the week, items in the transaction, etc.)
- Hook provided to validate the contents of the shopping cart. This hook can be used for many scenarios, including: adding products to the order because other products are there, validating specific items are in the cart together, verifying a minimum order amount, and more.
- Source code is 100% open, and can be configured any way necessary!
- NeuCart features a framework that allows for easy translation of all customer-facing text.
- For complete details of internationalization support, click here.
- Version: 5.01, Schema: 501. Updated on April 2, 10:35pm EDT.