Miscellaneous Settings

On the fifth and last tab of the Order Settings page you can set the following properties.

On stores with a large amount of categories and category levels, it is recommended that you set this option to Yes to improve the speed at which the advanced search page (search.asp) loads in the storefront. If set to No (default), the advanced search page included a Filter by Category drop-down menu. Try both settings and see if the performance of the advanced search page is affected. Does the page loading time change? If it does, you might want to consider turning this setting on to hide the category drop-down.

You can decide whether you want your store to display the current stock level on the product details page. The information is displayed at the top of the page, just under the product part number. Note that if you configure a specific product to ignore inventory settings (Disregard Inventory setting on the add/edit product page), the number of units in stock is automatically hidden.

Whether you want your store to display an Out of stock message for products that are out of stock (quantity is 0 or negative). If a product is out of stock and you have selected the Show Out of Stock option, then the product details page on your store will display an “Out of stock” message. You can change this as well as virtually every text string that appears in the storefront by editing the file includes/languages.asp as indicated in Editing Text in your Storefront.

When a product is out of stock and the product has been setup to allow back-orders, then the message that is shown to the customer is dependent on the number of days that it typically takes for the product to be available again. This is a setting that is set when adding or editing a product. If you enable back-ordering and enter “4” as the number of days after which the product is normally in stock again, the message in the storefront will say “Typically ships within 4 days”.

By default this option is set to No, and an input field is shown at the bottom of the Order Verification page during the checkout process (pc/orderVerify.asp). If there are no discounts or gift certificates available in your store, you can hide the field by setting this option to Yes.

By default your store allows customers to request an authorization to return a product that they have previously purchased and has been shipped to them (RMA = Return Merchandise Authorization). The link to request an RMA is shown on the order details page of the customer’s account area. The link is only shown after the order status has been updated to Shipped. The store manager is notified whenever a request is submitted. If you don't want customers to be able to request an RMA, you can disable this feature.

When customers log into their account and view previous orders, they can communicate with the store manager using the Help Desk that is built into ProductCart. If you don't want customers to have access to this feature, you can turn it off using this setting. More information on the Help Desk.

ProductCart v3 contains advanced interface elements that take advantage of a set of technologies that have been defined as AJAX. If you are interested in learning more about AJAX, Wikipedia has a good section on it. Among the AJAX-enhanced components you will find a search preview feature (which tells you how many results will be returned before you perform the search), a product preview feature (which provides product details when you mouse over a product name or thumbnail, without visiting the product details page – see example above), and others.

Because the number of calls to the database increases when using AJAX, it is strongly recommended that you only use this feature when your store is powered by a MS SQL database. If you are using MS Access, you should not use this feature or – if you do – you should regularly check your store for any performance issues. In addition, you should try disabling this feature if you are experiencing performance issues, regardless of the database use: compare the store performance when the feature is turned ON vs. OFF to understand whether it negatively impacts performance on your store.

• Changing the look of the AJAX product preview's window
• Enabling the AJAX product preview for recently viewed products
• For more information on how AJAX is used in ProductCart, please visit the section of the Early Impact Web site that is dedicated to AJAX.

This setting should always be set to ON except for the case in which a technician is troubleshooting a problem with the software. When set to ON, the error handler that is built into ProductCart always returns a friendly error in the storefront (this is also a security precaution). When set to OFF, it returns the actual error that has occurred.