You could create email campagin and send promotion emails to the mailing list such as news letter subscribers.

If your store has a huge amount of products in each category you want the hot and popular products to be shown first when customer browses. It's fairly amount of work to keep product ordered by popularity manually. In this version we implemented a way to update popularity based on product sale number and click count automatically. When customer browse into categories the top popular products are always shown first.

If your store has return policy you usually ask customer to call for return and assign a RMA#. To free up some work of your customer service we added online return management feature. You configure the return policy such as accept returns within # of days after sale, percentage of restocking fee etc. Customers submit return request via "My Account" on the website. Both store admins and customers get email confirmation. Customers can track return status in "My Account". View Demo

After customer placed order store admin sometimes needs to change the order either because customer might call into to add more items or store admin need to change prices or add discount etc. The new order edit feature is very flexible and also track product stocks as well. All the changes are recorded in the order notes for future reference.

If you need to charge recurrently or run a subscription based business this feature is very handy. You mark the product as recurring product. When customers buy the product the order becomes recurring order automatically. The payment happens the recurring cycle that you defined in the product setting. If customer cancels order the last payment cycle is prorated.

These promotion features are implemented in this version. Check screenshot for more details.

There are two places that cross sell products are shown to customers.

• In product detail page there are product recommendations such as custom also bought, might also like similar products etc. View Screenshot
• When customer adds a product to the shopping cart it's a great time to cross sell accessories related to the product added to the cart. View Screenshot

DotShoppingCart Open Source Edtion V1.1.0000 has just been released. Here is the list of the new features.

Major New Features:
1) New Payment module: PayPal Standard
2) Enhance the Theme and Color management. Now total 20 theme and color combinations are natively supported.
3) Enhance site layout configuration. Be able to change the size of images and product grid via store admin.
4) Use Google Analytics style GridView
5) Upgrade to use ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit Version 1.0.10920.0
6) Remove the dependency to SQLConfiguration and use configuration file for site configuration

Whosonline is a very useful feature. It gives you a quick view of who are viewing your website, where (search engine, direct link, referral site etc) they are from and what they are doing. It also supports page auto refresh. Check screenshot for more details.

We added product review and product rating to the product detail page so that customers can write product review. You will receive a notification email when a review is submitted. In the store admin you could approve, edit or reject the product review as you wish. Check the following screenshot.

Often times web site design involves image design such as buttons and box header etc. If you want to show a gradient color and make it compatible to all the browsers, you'd better start doing graphic design images. All these have made web site design a much harder to enter for average non-technical site owners. Part of the goals of DotShoppingCart is to enable non-technical people to easy use the software and turn it into a good looking e-commerce web site.

We have built several themes inside DotShoppingCart. The theme can be further customized such as changing colors and the sizes of building blocks such as side boxes. Normally when a theme consists of image buttons and image header bars, you cannot change the image button colors or the size of building blocks unless you re-draw these images by using the graphic design software. To resolve this problem we used the Windows GDI+ API to create image buttons dynamically based on the colors and sizes that you wish to customize. So in the end you first pick up a theme that you like and then further customize the overall looking by adjusting the colors and sizes of the building blocks. Within one click and "Crtl -F5" in the browse (complete refresh hot-key in IE), all the images defined in the theme are created on the fly.

I just got the first comment from Zack and the BlogEngine crashed. I had to debug and fixed the bug related to SQL data provider. So if you see it crashes again, please stay with me. Maybe I will rewrite BlogEngine someday.

DotShoppingCart is now an open source project. The license is based off MPL 1.1 plus the term to display DotShoppingCart logo display. More information could be found at here.