CS-Cart News & Information | CS-Cart News & Information

Wednesday, 06 July 2011 00:00

Easy migration to CS-Cart

We at CS-Cart understand that transferring data from existing shopping carts is often the only obstacle for some prospective users of our software. We help them with migrating data to CS-Cart as a part of our custom development service and it is useful when a source database is huge or its structure is deeply modified.

If it is required to transfer only major entities, it is faster and cheaper to use online shopping cart migration service. One of the most popular is Cart2Cart. This service allows a user to migrate his categories (and their images), products (with attributes and images), customers, orders, currencies and manufacturers from one shopping cart to CS-Cart automatically.

Cart2Cart currently supports data migration to CS-Cart from 31 most widespread shopping carts and provides their clients with numerous benefits:

A secure and accurate migration process – all data is transferred via secure SSL connection.
Cart2Cart migrates all the data automatically. It can save weeks of tedious work and allows a user to have his store up and running within a few hours.
All migrations are performed on Amazon EC2 service with no delays and data losses.
The process is quite simple and does not take much time. A step-by-step wizard allows to set up migration even for non-technically skilled people.

With Cart2Cart moving to CS-Cart is a matter of few hours now. To check how it works you can perform a free demo migration and migrate 10 customers and products to your CS-Cart store.

Tuesday, 07 December 2010 00:00

“Powered by CS-Cart” Link Removal License

Now all users of CS-Cart Community Edition get an opportunity to legally remove the “Powered by CS-Cart” link from the pages of their CS-Cart Community installations, which was strictly prohibited by the license agreement.

Our new Link Removal License costs only $65 and entitles the user to remove the link to the website www.cs-cart.com from one copy of CS-Cart Community.

Those who use several copies of CS-Cart Community and want to get rid of the link on each of them must acquire the appropriate number of the Link Removal Licenses.

To obtain the Link Removal License, users of CS-Cart Community Edition should log in to their personal Customer Help Desk accounts, go to section CS-Cart Domain Licenses and order the license.

New users of CS-Cart Community Edition can simply select the Link Removal License check box below the Download button at www.cs-cart.com/free.html.

Thursday, 11 November 2010 00:00

CS-Cart 2.1.2 Released

Branch 2.1 goes forward at a steady gait! A new CS-Cart version 2.1.2 becomes available today.

This new release not only offers a number of routine fixes and improvements, but it features a few innovations that make it really remarkable. Let’s have a look at them.

Block Caching to Enhance Storefront Performance

Recently we’ve been working on and speeding up the customer frontend of CS-Cart software. To solve this issue, we experimented with different caching capabilities that are known to reduce page load time well.

Starting from CS-Cart version 2.1.2 we equip our shopping cart system with the ability to save the HTML output of blocks that appear on the storefront in the CS-Cart cache. When the next visitor requests the same block, the output is easily retrieved from the cache without going through all the database queries and addressing multiple files. When you make changes to the storefront contents like categories, products and static pages, new HTML output will be generated and cached automatically.

This is extremely helpful for the most frequently used elements of the storefront as well as parts of pages that don’t change too often, but are somewhat heavy to generate. Clearly, it makes more sense to generate the output once and then use it again and again. And shoppers will certainly enjoy the performance of your web store.

And that’s what our tests showed when we compared the load of the home page of CS-Cart 2.1.1 and CS-Cart 2.1.2.

cscart-performance-comparison

Catalog Mode to Showcase Products

Normally, the products on the storefront can be added to the shopping cart and purchased directly on your website.

catalog_mode_off

Running your store in the catalog mode makes it possible to only showcase products on your website, but not really sell them there. The Add to Cart button is replaced with the Buy Now button linked to an external website where the product is actually sold.

catalog_mode_on

This functionality can help you built a full-fledged online catalog with affiliate links to partner websites or, for instance, sell products that must be ordered by phone. Besides, in CS-Cart you can combine both modes and run the store as a shopping cart and a catalog, and thus sell products directly in your store and showcase products from companion websites.

Instant Product Search to Improve Customer Experience

“This enhancement for the storefront shows search results as the shopper types in the search bar. So, customers can get to the right product much faster because they don’t have to finish typing a full search term and even click on Search.

Moreover, this can help guide your customers’ search: many of them may not know the exact product name plus the small product thumbnail in the search results gives the first impression of the product.

quick_search