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Cateory Screenshot
Category View The auto-generated categories have several great features to help customer find product easily.
  • Smart subcategories to break down products into manufacoturers or price ranages
  • Show number of products in each category
  • Categories with a large number of products are seperated into pages that keep page size reasonable
  • Products in categories can be sorted by featured products, price low to high, price high to low, name A to Z, name Z to A etc
Product Detail Screenshot
Product Detail View The auto-generated product detail page has all the information needed for customer to know about this product.
  • Mutiple product images
  • Mousing over the small color swatch displays the associated large product image
  • Display or write product reviews
  • Ask question or send the link to friends
  • Smart product recommendations such as custom also bought, you might also like similar products etc
Add to Cart Screenshot
Add item to Cart When customer adds an item to shopping cart, it's a great time to cross sell accessories related to the product added to the cart.
  • Cross sell products
  • Recommend products such as custom also bought
  • Show mini-cart
Shopping Cart Screenshot
Shopping Cart Here is the list of cart view features.
  • Update and delete item easily
  • Estimate shipping cost
  • Support coupons
  • Support gift certificate/store credit
  • Allow gift wrap with gift note at additional fee
  • Customize your checkout policy
Whosonline Screenshot
Who is online? 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.
User Tracking Screenshot
User Tracking While whosonline view gives you just a live snapshot of your store visitors, user tracking records all the histroy information about all the visitors for a certain period. It has all these usefully informations.
  • Where visitors came from, Google Ads, Yahoo Ads, organic search?
  • Which search keyword brought visitors to your site
  • How long they stayed in your site
  • Which pages they browsed (Navigation Path)
  • What's in the shopping cart
  • Page views, IP address etc
New Featuers in Version 1.1
Email Campaign and News Letter

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

Automatically adjust the order of products shown in category

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.

Online Return Management

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

Edit Order

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.

Recurring Order and Subscription

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.

Coupon, Gift Certificate, Gift Wrap with Notice

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

Cross Sell

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 Public Edition V1.1 is released

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

New Featuers in Version 1.0
Whosonline View

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.

Product Review

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.

Use dynamic image creation to make site easy to customize

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.

Full source code is now released. Enjoy!

DotShoppingCart Public License V1 full source code is now released at CodePlex. The remaining external dependencies are as follows. If you would like to compile these externals yourself, please follow the links to download the source code.

BlogEngine.NET was crashing on me

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 turns into open source project

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.

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Recent Comments
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Hi... I am inexperiance to build up ECommenrce type sites.I have a little bits knowladge ...
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Congrats on V4.0.....It is so easy to use  
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