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.

Add-On Modules

• Store and customer service feedback via the Testimonials module
• Customer reviews and ratings via the Reviews module
• Send newsletter emails, and post news on your website via the News module.
• Instant price totals on product detail page without adding item to the cart, via the QuickTotal module
• Offer downloadable merchandise (software, e-books, etc...) via the Download Delivery module

Product Options

• Simple choices like "size" or "color"
• Gather text for engravings, gift cards, etc
• Charge per character entered. Optionally charge for spaces if needed.
• Completely customize an item (such as a computer system)
• Add optional extra items
• Gather image or other files from your customer to customize a product.
• 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

Discounts

• 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:
  
  - Coupon Code
  - Date
  - Number of products in order
  - Ship to country or state/province
  - Order product total
  - Order weight total
  - Number of a specific product in cart
  - Number of products from a specific category
  - Group membership
• 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
• Display discounts that customer is receiving 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 . They can also be shown when viewing a product's detail page.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Features

• Change page title, meta title, meta description, and meta keywords on a per product and category basis
• SEO URL feature allows you to remove query strings from category and product URLs:
  http://www.example.com/store.php?crn=154&rn=87&action=show_detail
  replacing them with more meaningful information:
  http://www.example.com/products/custom-printed-t-shirts

Storefront Components

• Product Catalog navigation block - displays categories for browsing.
• Account Options navigation block - when logged in, displays options for the customer. When logged out, displays the login form. User accounts can be configured so they are required, optional, or not present at all.
  • Best Sellers navigation block - optionally display top ten items on homepage
  • Category Preview navigation block - this is shown when you are viewing a product. It is a preview of other items in the category you currently are viewing. In the example, the category preview is seen on the right hand side of the page.
  • Best Selling Item - optionally displayed on homepage
  • Indicate products are new
  • Display subset of new products on your homepage
  • Simple and Advanced Search

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
  - Display item as out of stock, and do not allow customer to purchase it
  - Display item normally, and allow customer to purchase it
  - Do not display item

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
• 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

• Email order confirmation to customer.
• Email order notification to merchant.
• Emails can be sent in both HTML and text format
• Customers can choose their email format preference
• Send newsletter emails, and post news on your website via our News module. (sold separately)

Shipping Features

• FedEx® Compatible - Lighthouse Development has completed the FedEx® Compatible Solutions Program. Squirrelcart is certified to work with FedEx®.
  - There is no additional fee to use the FedEx® tools
  - Signing up is quick and easy through Squirrelcart's control panel
  - Customers can obtain live rate information for shipments during checkout
  - Merchants can submit shipments directly to FedEx from Squirrelcart's control panel
  - Print labels for shipments directly from Squirrelcart
  - When a shipment is submitted, an email is automatically sent to the customer with
    information to track the package.
  - Customers and merchants can track shipments
• UPS OnLine® Tools Built In.
  - Your customers can track their packages in your store front
  - You can track packages in the administration interface
  - Your customers can get Rates and Services selections via UPS in your store front
  - You can get Rates and Services selections in the administration interface.
• USPS Web Tools - your customers can get live USPS rates from USPS.com without leaving your site
• 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
  - Cost of order
  - Number of items in order
  - Country, State, or City order is shipping to
  - Many more conditions available
• 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.

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 total number and amount of orders in admin interface

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

• Credit Card
• Electronic Check
• Check
• Money Order
• Google Checkout
• Custom

Payment Gateway/Processor Support

• 2Checkout (v1 & v2)
• Amazon Payments (Simple Pay & Checkout by Amazon)
• Authorize.Net (AIM & SIM)
• Beanstream
• BluePay
• CommWeb
• CyberSource
• e-Path
• ECHO (Electronic Clearing House)
• ePDQ (Barclaycard UK)
• eSelect Plus (by Moneris)
• eWay
• Ezic
• Fast Charge
• First Data Global Gateway (API & Connect)
• Goemerchant
• Google Checkout
• Innovative Gateway
• iTransact
• LinkPoint (API & Select)
• Merchant Partners
• MSC Secure
• Netcash
• NOCHEX
• Optimal Payments
• Orbital (Chase Paymentech)
• Pay-Me-Now
• PayFuse
• Paymate
• PayPal (Website Payments Pro & Standard, Payflow Pro and Payflow Link)
• PayPoint (formerly SECpay)
• PayPointUSA
• Paystation (New Zealand)
• PaySystems.net
• Protx (VSP Direct & VSP Form)
• PSiGate
• QuickCommerce Pro
• Sage
• SECPay
• SecurePay
• Skipjack
• Star Processing
• StrataPay
• Transaction Central
• TransFirst ePayment Services
• Tranzila
• Trinity by Payjunction.com
• TrustCommerce
• USAePay
• ViaKlix
• Virtual Merchant
• Westpac
• WonderPay
• WorldPay
• YourPay

CMS (Content Management System) Features

• 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

• 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....

• 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.

• 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

• 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

• reCaptcha for human verification
• Slimbox - 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