Introduction > X-Cart Key Features > 

Customer Service

Customer care

Registered customers can use X-Cart's 'Orders history' section to access information about any order they have ever placed at your store. Using this section, a customer can search for a specific order, view its status and details, print out the order invoice, etc. Orders can be searched for by date of creation, by order id or by order status. The information in the 'Orders history' section is updated in real time, so the customer can get the most up-to-date information about any order whenever needed.

A visitor of an X-Cart-based store does not have to be a registered customer to be able to make a purchase. X-Cart allows shoppers to check out anonymously (without logging in to a customer account). The checkout procedure is the same for registered and anonymous customers - with the exception that, when checkout is initiated by an anonymous customer, X-Cart's checkout procedure includes an extra step at which the customer's contact information and shipping/billing addresses are collected. The checkout procedure for registered customers does not have this step, because they have their contact information and addresses stored in their customer profiles and can re-use them simply by loggin in. In addition to not having to re-enter their contact and billing/shipping info every time on checkout, owners of registered customer accounts have a number of other advantages: for example, they can create wish lists, view their order histories, etc. Depending on the desired functionality, your customers can choose to set up a customer account or to work anonymously.

If a registered customer forgets the password for logging in to their customer account, they can re-request their account access information to be sent to the e-mail address that was used for the registration of their customer account.

Registered customers can create wish lists. A wish list is a place where a customer can add titles of the products that he or she wants. Wish lists are stored in the database similarly to registered customers' shopping carts and may serve as a reminder for their owner to buy certain products or can be shared by the owner with his or her friends or family members in order to give them some gift ideas for a coming event (birthday, wedding, etc).

Upon your wish, the Product details page of your products may contain a button that your customers will be able to use to mail the complete information about the product to a friend's email address.

After a registered customer leaves the store / logs out, his or her shopping cart is stored in the database. Next time that this customer logs in, he or she finds the cart contents in the same state as it was on the previous visit. This feature makes X-Cart very convenient for customers who need time to decide whether they really want the products that they added to the shopping cart or not: a customer can add something to the cart, leave the store, think the purchase over and then return to the cart and complete the purchase without having to search for the previously selected product items again. This feature is also great for repeat orders: customers who regularly order the same product set do not have to search for the necessary product items every time they want to make an order.

In the Customer zone of your X-Cart-based store, all pages of the catalog (including category pages, product list pages and product details pages) have a printable version. Customers can access the printable version of a page by clicking the button "Printable version" displayed on the page.

You can allow customers of different memberships to purchase products at different prices. The prices can be adjusted to depend on the quantity of items being ordered and on the membership level of the customer who orders them.

A customer can remove all the products items that have been added to the shopping cart with a single click.

Customers can easily edit the options of product items in their shopping cart or wishlist.

Customers can print their order invoices. The "Print invoice" link displayed at the top of each page that shows an invoice provides a printable version of the invoice. Invoices can be printed not just for orders that have just been placed, but for any order from the customer's order history.

The Customer zone of an X-Cart-based store provides a form that allows customers to contact the store's Help/Support department - "Contact us" form. You can configure the set of fields that should be included into this form and specify, which of these fields should be active (available for completion by customers), and which - required (mandatory for completion by customers). If the field set for the "Contact us" form provided by X-Cart does not exactly meet your needs, it is possible to add your own (custom) fields to this form.

X-Cart allows you inform your customers about things happening at your store (store site news, new arrivals, items on sale, special offers, etc):

- You can publish news in the "News" section of the store website. The latest news will be displayed to the website visitors in the "News" box, while the news published some time ago will be available via the link 'Previous news' as a news archive.

- You can allow website visitors to subscribe to your newsletter, so news will be sent directly to their email addresses. Within your newsletter, you will be able to set up several news categories - news lists - and allow visitors to subscribe not to the entire newsletter, but just to the news lists in which they are interested. Store visitors will be able to subscribe to any of your active news lists, no matter whether they are registered customers or not. For each of your news lists, you will have a mailing list - a list of email addresses of the news list subscribers. You will have full control of your mailing lists, including that you will be able to add individual addresses to a mailing list, remove individual addresses from a mailing list, or export selected addresses from a mailing list to a CSV-formatted file. To import addresses into a mailing list use a text file, the format of which should be the following:

email1@example.com

email2@example.com

email3@example.com.

Customer accommodation

In an X-Cart-based store, every registered customer has a personal profile that stores his or her name, contact information, address, membership, etc. The profile is stored in the database and allows the customer to reuse the information stored in it. In addition to the customer's personal profile, the store database stores information associated with it - contents of the customer's shopping cart, the customer's wish list, etc.

You can enable a module that will greet your customers by the name when they return to your store website.

It is possible to provide discounts for your store's registered customers. All you need to do it set up a membership providing access to a discount and enable your registered customers to sign up for this membership.

When placing an order, a customer needs to provide information about him- or herself (name, title, phone number, email address, shipping/billing address, etc). To avoid the necessity to enter this information every time, a customer may choose to become registered. After the customer becomes registered, he or she will be able to re-use the information stored in the profile simply by logging in. In addition to that, the customer will have some additional advantages: he or she will be able to modify the information stored in the profile, to track previously placed orders, to keep a wish list, etc.

Registered customers can edit information in their personal profiles (password, personal information, billing/shipping addresses, contact information, desired membership, news lists to which they want to be subscribed, etc).

You can provide your store visitors with the ability to subscribe to your store's newsletter. To subscribe, a visitor will need to specify the news lists that he or she wishes to receive and to provide an email address at which he or she wishes to receive them. When the visitor subscribes to a news list, his or her e-mail address is added to the mailing list of that news list. After that, the visitor receives all the messages that you send within the news list until he or she chooses to discontinue the subscription. To discontinue receiving news messages, any of your store's newsletter subscribers will be able to remove their email address from the mailing list by visiting the 'Unsubscribe' link provided in each newsletter.

You can allow your customers to post feedback about the products at your store. Two types of customer feedback are supported: product ratings and customer reviews.

Product ratings are product evaluations based on a 5-point scale, the choice "Excellent" corresponding to the highest rating of five points, "Poor" - to the lowest rating of one point. Customers who wish to rate a product select the desired rating and submit their vote. The resultant product rating is calculated as a simple average of ratings given to the product by all the customers who have voted.

Customer reviews are product evaluations provided in textual form. Customers who wish to write a review of a certain product create a message and post it using a special form for reviews.

You can review, edit and delete ratings and reviews posted by customers to prevent abuse.

Registered customers can create a wishlist - a dream shopping list containing product items that the customer would like to buy in the future.