Eicra Soft shopping cart software features :

Eicra Soft Shop-Script software provides hundreds of practical and useful ecommerce features. This page identifies core features supported by different versions of Eicra Soft Shop-Script shopping cart software. To find which Shop-Script applications support specific features please refer to the Products section of this website.

Ecommerce Templates Admin Features

View Orders
Change username / password
Edit admin settings
Affiliates program
View ratings
Gift certificate management
Edit categories
Edit products
Edit product options
Edit quantity pricing
Discounts and coupons
Client login / wholesale pricing
Email message admin
Edit States
Edit Countries
Edit Postal Zones
UPS Shipping
Edit Payment Providers
Edit Order Status
Edit Manufacturers
Drop shippers / Designers / Manufacturers
Mailing List Management
Edit Search Criteria
IP Blocking
CSV Upload
Troubleshooting

View Orders

When orders start coming into your online store, you can view the details here. Using the date selections up top you can view a list or all orders for different date ranges. Orders that have an authorization code are shown in black, but those that have not are shown in red. This could be because your customer gave up before making payment at the payment processor. It could also be however that they did make payment, but did not make it back to your store to complete the order for some reason. Check with your payment processor to make sure.

Change username / password

The default username and password for the online web administration is mystore / changeme. For security reasons you are encouraged to change this as soon as possible.

Edit admin settings

This should probably be the first page to visit in setting up your store. On this page you can set the general attributes of your online store such as your email address for sale notification and the URL of your online store - the URL will generally be the same as your domain unless you have placed the store in a folder on your site. You can also choose your shipping options as well as the number of items to display per page and whether or not you want to use the stock management feature.

Affiliate program

The built in affiliate program allows you to offer partners a commission on orders made through a link to your store. The amount you pay out is completely up to you. Affiliate sales can be monitored through the affiliate admin page and payments made depending on the deal you would like to offer

View ratings

Product reviews are a great way of providing on-topic content, useful to both customers and search engines alike. As they are provided by visitors and reviewed by the store owner before publishing you can be guaranteed fresh and relevant copy for your store. To turn on this feature you will need to add the following to vsadmin/includes.php $enablecustomerratings=TRUE;

Gift certificate management

The Gift Certificate feature allows your customers to purchase a gift certificate on your store for the amount of their choice and send it on to their chosen recipient. The difference between the value of the certificate and the product(s) added to cart is calculated and the difference recorded accordingly. The recipient is notified via an email which includes a personalized message and the code they will need to enter on checkout to redeem the gift certificate.

Edit categories

Your products are organized into categories by default, such as socks could be in the clothing category. If you only have a few products and do not want to take advantage of this feature then instead of making your main "Products" link to categories.php, just make it to products.php. Then, define just one category to put all your products into.

Edit products

This is where you can setup the details about the products you wish to sell online. The first screen will show a list of the products you have in your database. Normally products will be shown in bold black type, but if a product is configured to not have a "Buy" button, then it will be shown in red. If it is configured to not be shown on the store at all, then it will be shown in "strikethrough". If you chose the "New Product" or "Modify Product" options you will be given a screen to edit the product options. Certain options such as the product reference number, price, section and name are obligatory and are therefore marked with a red asterisk. Please note that the references to the product images are just references. You must upload them to your site via ftp. If you add a large image or long description then in the products page a link will be automatically shown to a "product details" page which will show this extra product information. There may be more or less information shown on this page depending on the shipping options you have chosen, such as the product weight. So, it is probably best to set your shipping options before setting up your products.

Edit quantity pricing

In version 4.7.0 we introduced the option of quantity pricing. This means you can adjust the price depending on the number of items of a particular product purchased. Check the box on the quantity pricing page if you want to show a drop down menu of all product ids you have available when setting up the price breaks. Leaving the box unchecked means that you will have to enter the product id manually. You can make your customers aware of the price breaks offered by adding the details to the product description.

Discounts and coupons

Discounts and coupons are powerful marketing tools that allow you to give your clients special offers on products or categories, allow wholesalers to purchase at special rates, provide incentives through your offline advertising or help clear "difficult to sell" stock amongst many other uses.

Client login / wholesale pricing

In Version 4.2.0 we introduced the customer login feature. This allows for wholesale pricing / tax / shipping exemption for login customers and page protection. This means it is possible to offer retail and wholesale pricing without the need for a second database as well as offering tax and shipping exemption to particular users. You can also restrict access to certain pages of your site.

Email message admin

From version 5.6 headers and footers for the order emails and drop shippers can be formatted through the control panel rather than going through vsadmin/includes.php. It is also possible to change the order status email as well as the ones sent to the buyer and receiver of a gift certificate. These can be used in conjunction with the FCK HTML editor on our free downloads page.

Edit States

From version 5.6 headers and footers for the order emails and dropshippers can be formatted through the control panel rather than going through vsadmin/includes.php. It is also possible to change the order status email as well as the ones sent to the buyer and receiver of a gift certificate. These can be used in conjunction with the FCK HTML editor on our free downloads page.

Edit Countries

The store software displays a list of worldwide countries in the checkout phase, and their attributes can be edited here. Firstly you can chose if you wish to ship to the country at all. Be careful when deciding this as it is tempting to support every country to increase sales, but unfortunately some also attract more fraudulent orders than others. Country tax can be set on this page also. The figure is expressed as a percentage, so for instance if a country incurs 16% tax, then just enter 16 in the box provided. The position can be used to set the order the countries are displayed in the checkout drop down. "On Top" will put that country on the top of the list. "On Top of Top" will put that country above that even. This means that you can have the "United States" above the "United Kingdom", and then the rest in the usual alphabetical order. If you have chosen "Weight based shipping" you are also given the option to set the shipping zone that applies to that country. We have ordered the countries roughly into the United States, the Americas, Europe and the rest of the world, but do examine these carefully for the countries you decide to ship to.

FAS

This setting only applies to "Free Standard Shipping". It enables you to set free shipping only for orders within a particular country. Only those countries checked will be eligible for free standard shipping. Remember that a rule will have to be set up first in your discount admin page for this to apply

Edit Postal Zones

This option is only shown if you have chosen Weight Based shipping. The first screen is a "named" list of the zones you wish to support. The names are for your own purposes only really, and can be anything like "Zone 1", "Europe", "Eastern Europe" or whatever has meaning for you. Once you have added some zone names and clicked submit, go back to this page and you will see that there is a link "Edit Zone Rules" next to the zone names. The first column is a list of weight limits. The second column is a list of costs. The actual scale of the weight limits is irrelevant really and can have any meaning you wish, such as grams, kilograms, pounds etc.

Price based shipping

This option follows the same rules as weight based shipping as described above with the obvious difference that we are referring to maximum price rather than maximum weight. After editing your list of rules you'll need to apply the rules on the countries admin page.

Shipping methods

"Edit USPS Shipping Methods" and "Edit UPS Shipping Methods" only show up if you turn on USPS or UPS shipping. This is to limit the shipping methods available for USPS and UPS.

Edit Payment Providers

The payment providers allowed by the system are shown on this page. You will need a valid account with the payment provider, and once you have that you need to enter the account details on these pages. The "Email" option means that no payment is taken for that particular order, and only details of the order are recorded in the database. It is useful for taking orders where payment will be taken later, and also for testing the system prior to going live. Payment options that are operative are shown in Bold. Those that are in demo mode are shown in red. Please note that there is actually no demo mode available for PayPal. They recommend setting up a cheap (say 1 cent) product for testing.

Edit Order Status

This is where you can set the status of your order and the default options are unauthorized, cancelled, deleted, authorized, packing, shipping, shipped, completed. It is possible to change these values in the Admin Order Status page to give a clearer message to the public if they choose to view the status of their order. Using Internet Explorer on a PC there is a quick method for changing lots of order status at once. If you say change an orders status to "Shipped" and hold down the Ctrl key the all the orders on that page will have the status changed to shipped. This is not available on other browsers.

Edit Manufacturers

This is where you can add new manufacturers. Once you have them set up you can assign them to products in the products admin page, choosing from the drop down list. These can be added to help narrow down the search on your search page - to do this you will need to add $searchbymanufacturer="Manufacturer";
to vsadmin/includes.php and to show the manufacturer field on the products page, add
$manufacturerfield="Manufacturer";

Drop shipping

Here you can group products per manufacturer etc., keep track of the sales per group and allows the ability of email notification when a particular order is ordered through your store. This may be the drop shipping company, a manufacturer, a contributor or anyone really you need to notify of a sale. Once you have set up the accounts for each entity you can then choose who needs to be notified from the drop down box on the corresponding product admin page. Sales can then be tracked through the drop shipper admin page.

Mailing List Management

This is the page where you can administer the sign-ups for your mailing list. You can confirm, modify, add and delete users as well as sending out text or html based emails. The newsletter feature is designed for small to medium sized lists so shouldn't be used if you have many thousands of members.

IP blocking

If you need to block someone using a particular or range of IP numbers then you can set them up here. Use this function sparingly so as not to block legitimate users. Visitors who are blocked will not be able to complete the checkout process.

CSV upload

If you need to block someone using a particular or range of IP numbers then you can set them up here. Use this function sparingly so as not to block legitimate users. Visitors who are blocked will not be able to complete the checkout process. From version 5.1.0 it is possible to update your database, and upload new products to your database from a windows CSV file. (This is the kind that would be generated from Excel.) Browse to the location of your CSV file and click submit. You can choose "Add to database" to add new products to the database or "Update database" to update the products in the database. The first row in the CSV file must be a list of database columns. The columns available are ...

pID
pName
pSection
pImage
pImage2
pImage3
pImage4
pImage5
pLargeImage
pLargeImage2
pLargeImage3
pLargeImage4
pLargeImage5
pGiantImage
pGiantImage2
pGiantImage3
pGiantImage4
pGiantImage5
pPrice
pWholesalePrice
pListPrice
pShipping
pShipping2
pWeight
pDisplay
pSell
pExemptions
pInStock
pDims
pTax
pDropship
pStaticPage
pStockByOpts
pRecommend
pOrder,pSKU
pManufacturer
pDescription
pLongDescription
pDownload (Only if using the digital downloads plug-in)

Most will have sensible defaults so you only need specify the fields you require, but you should normally set pDisplay and pSell to 1 and you must have a pID specified for the product id. The pSection column currently has to be the numeric id of the product section which you can find on the admin categories page. You should be able to dump the "full inventory", edit this and reimport it.