Introduction > X-Cart Key Features > 

Merchandising and Inventory

You can enable discount coupon codes at your store. A discount coupon code is a secret code that a customer can enter into an appropriate form on checkout to get a discount. You can create as many different discount coupon codes for your customers as you like. For each discount coupon you can define the amount of discount (can be expressed as an absolute or percentage value or as free shipping on the entire order), the number of times that the coupon code can be used, the coupon code expiration date and the requirements that a customer's order must meet for the customer to be allowed to use the coupon code (e.g. "The order subtotal must equal or exceed <amount>" or "The cart must contain <product>", or "The cart must contain products from the category <category>").

X-Cart has support for gift certificates: you can sell gift certificates to your customers and accept them as a payment method. Any order containing products can be paid for by a gift certificate (fully - if the balance on the gift certificate equals or exceeds the order total, or partially - if the balance on the gift certificate is smaller than the order total). Orders containing just gift certificates (no products) cannot be paid for by a gift certificate.

Gift certificates can be printed for sending by regular mail. Two pre-designed sample templates are provided for printable gift certificates. It is possible to enable your customers to choose a design for the gift certificate cards that will be sent by postal mail.

X-Cart provides you full control over the store inventory:

- At the time of creating a product, you specify how many items of this product you have for sale. This is the product's "quantity in stock". As customers begin to order items of this product, X-Cart tracks how the product's quantity in stock decreases. At any moment you can find out how many items of the product remain in stock just by looking at the product's Product details page.

- If you wish, you can also specify a "low limit" for each of your products. A "low limit" is a quantity of product items in stock on reaching which X-Cart sends a notification to a designated email address. A notification about the quantity of a certain product having reached the "low limit" serves as a reminder for the product provider to re-stock the product before it is sold out.

Once a product's quantity in stock reaches 0 (zero), X-Cart forbids addition of this product to cart. Depending on your choice, it can leave the out-of-stock product on the storefront with an "Out of stock" message or remove it from the storefront completely.

You can enable purchase discounts at your store. In X-Cart, a purchase discount is a discount that is automatically applied to a customer's order when the order subtotal exceeds a certain amount. You can define as many purchase discounts as you like. For each purchase discount, you will be able to adjust the order subtotal amount on which it should be given and the amount of discount expressed as an absolute or percentage value. If you wish, you can set up your purchase discounts in such a way that they will be applied depending on the customer's membership.

You can define retail and wholesale prices for products. Wholesale prices can be adjusted to depend on the quantity of product items being ordered and/or the membership of the customer who orders them.

You can set a minimum ordering quantity for each of your products and thus prevent your customers from placing orders that are too small and inconvenient to handle.

As long as your store uses inventory tracking functionality, it will prevent customers from adding products whose quantity in stock has reached zero to the shopping cart. If you do not want this to happen (which may be the case if the quantity available for sale is unlimited for all the products that you sell), you can disable inventory tracking for your store.