Hosting> E-Commerce

Go Shopping with Squirrels

If you are thinking about selling products online yet, need to it be easy. Look no further, Squirrelcart is here. Cybershore shopped around for powerful yet easy-to-use shopping carts, Squirrelcart faired best when you look at all the features.

Completely driven by a MySQL database on our Plesk server, Squirrel delivers features you would find in cart systems priced in the thousands.

The administration of your store could not be easier.

[ View the administration demo ]

[ View the storefront demo ]

Adding and modifing products and catagories is a snap and it even has a built in image editor.

Shipping via UPS is a snap and your customer can come back to your site to track thier UPS package with 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.

Selling products in different colors and sizes? Enter them once, then apply them to the products as needed with price variables. If XL in green is $3 more on the t-shirt but $5 more on the long sleeve, you don't have to jump through hoops and re-enter new variables over and over again.

Need to offer a discount? No, problem. Discounts can be based on number of items bought, special code, date, total of order, or even based on what type of customer is shopping. Discounts can be applied to one product (or more) or products in a particular catagory or across the board.

If you are a web-designer, you will appreciate the simplicity of the template files and time savings from only needing to edit the CSS style sheet to make dramatic changes to the design.

Design and Hosting
Cybershore can create a custom design and get you ready to enter your products or we can install the shopping cart for you and you take the reins right away. Squirrelcart is only available under our Pro Hosting Plan with E-commerce added and is hosted on a Unix platform without support for ASP or Cold Fusion.

If you would like to learn more, please contact us.

A couple of sites we have created using Squirrelcart.

FreeFreight.biz

BoldStrummerLTD.com

LightingEdge.com
Modified to only be a catalog. Sorry but, you can't see the custom administration section. Only their sales reps can log-in to view greater detail and pricing.

Features of the Squirrel Cart Shopping Cart

Completely Database Driven
Customers, Products, Categories, Store Settings, Shipping Options, Payment Methods, and Orders are all stored in an fast and efficient MySQL database.

Product and Category Features

Unlimited number of products and categories

Price/weight altering product options, in the form of SELECT form inputs, or TEXT / TEXTAREA field types. This allows you to offer options for a product, and charge accordingly.You can specify a set of options for a single product, or fall every product in a particular category.

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.

Storefront Features

Best Selling Item - optionally displayed on homepage
Best Sellers - optionally display top ten items on homepage
Display subset of new products on your homepage
Simple and Advanced Search
User Login (which can be configured to be required, optional, or not present)
Category Preview - view a subset of items in a given category, while viewing detail of an item in that category

Inventory Control
Keep track of your stock
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

Email Features
Email order confirmation to customer
Email order notification to merchant.

Shipping Features
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

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

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

Order Management
Customers can view their order history in detail
Merchant can specify status of order in admin interface
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. They 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.

Check
Money Order
Credit Card
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:

2Checkout.com (v1 & v2)
Authorize.Net (AIM & SIM)
Bank of America (eStores)
CyberSource
ECHO (Electronic Clearing House)
eWay
Goemerchant
NOCHEX
iTransact
LinkPoint (API & Select)
PayPal
PaySystems.com
PSiGate
Star Processing
TrustCommerce
USAePay
VeriSign Payflow Pro & Link
ViaKlix
WonderPay
WorldPay
YourPay (uses LinkPoint)

Or via email without a gateway processor but still safe for you and your customers.

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 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.
Behavioral settings:
Many aspects of Squirrelcart's behavior can be easily modified in your store settings. Some of the things you can change are:

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 .
If you would like to learn more, please contact us.