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.

This setting was introduced with ProductCart v4.

ProductCart displays the 'Add to Cart' button wherever products are shown and available for purchase (see when it is NOT shown). You can disable this 'Quick Buy' feature and not show the 'Add to Cart' button in cases in which it would be shown. This also hides the quantity box in the category display if the list view with Add Multiple Items to Cart is selected.

NOTE: On stores that are particularly busy or have a substantial amount of products, turning off this feature can also lead to a performance improvement as ProductCart will not have to determine whether the product is eligible for 'Quick Buy'.

ProductCart automatically takes the buyer to the 'Show shopping cart' page (viewCart.asp) when one or more items are added to the cart. If you enable this feature, customers will stay on the same page. A message will be displayed to them indicating that the products were added to the cart. The message window contains a link to view the shopping cart.

You can style the confirmation message window by using the styles contained in the cascading style sheet pcStorefront.css, which is located in the pc folder. Look for the styles toward the bottom of the page under “Stay on Page when Adding to the Cart - Confirmation message window”.

Here is a visual example of what is shown to the user when this feature is “On” and a product is added to the shopping cart.

This feature was introduced with ProductCart v4. The feature was based on code originally developed by ProductCart Certified Developer GreyBeard Design Group.

In ProductCart v4 you can turn Keyword-rich URLs (also called search engine optimized or “SEO URLs” elsewhere in our documentation) directly through the ProductCart Control Panel. A separate file set is no longer needed as the default files now support this feature.

• ProductCart will attempt to determine whether your server is “ready” to support this feature
• There are some settings that need to be set on the server side before you can successfully use this feature
• See the Keyword-rich URLs section of this User Guide for details

If you are upgrading from ProductCart v3 and were using Keyword-rich URLs in that version, please see the v4 Upgrade instructions on this topic.

When you disable Gift Registries, the “Manage Gift Registries” link located on the customer account home page (pc/custPref.asp) is hidden, and therefore customers cannot create and edit a Gift Registry. This setting was added as part of the ProductCart v3.51 update.

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 contains advanced interface elements that take advantage of a set of technologies that have been defined as AJAX (more information on AJAX).

Among the AJAX-enhanced components you will find:

• search preview feature, which tells you how many results will be returned before you perform the search
• product details preview feature, which provides product details when you mouse over a product thumbnail, without visiting the product details page
• category content preview feature (new in ProductCart v4), which provides information on the subcategories and products contained in that category

In ProductCart v4 and above, you can separately turn on and off the different previews. In previous versions, you could only turn on and off the entire feature.

Here are some screen shots that will help you visualize what this feature does.

(1) Category only contains products:

(2) Category only contains subcategories:

(3) Category that contains both:

Although we are not aware of any performance issues linked to this feature, we would still like to mention that this feature increases the number of “calls” to the store database. Therefore, it is strongly recommended that you only use this feature when your store is powered by a MS SQL database. In addition, you should try disabling this feature if you are experiencing performance issues: compare the store performance when the feature is turned ON vs. OFF to understand whether this feature is negatively impacting 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 information on the last error that was recorded on the page.

Please note:

• The error handler saves the last query executed on the page, even if the error is not related to it
• The error handler does not save the “raw” error (it is technically not possible to do so). If you need more information for troubleshooting purposes, you may wish to have ProductCart print raw errors to the page.