Lesson 5. CS-Cart General Settings — Part 2

This is the second part of the big overview dedicated to general settings of CS-Cart php ecommerce software. In this video we continue to move from the top to the bottom explaining the purposes of the following settings:

In the previous video we reviewed some of the basic settings of CS-Cart. Now it is time to speak about catalog settings and promotions.

The first setting in the Catalog section is Enable inventory tracking. Simply speaking the inventory tracks the quantity of your products. At the products page there is a column where the number of available products is displayed. When a customer creates an order the Inventory tracking system automatically deducts the number of ordered products from the general quantity. So, when somebody buys or returns a product the quantity changes accordingly.

The next setting allows customers to compare products. Customers can compare features, prices, and design of the products.

Allow negative amount in inventory is the next setting. If this setting is enabled customers will be able to order products that are out of stock. So, instead of displaying the Out of stock notification there is the Add to cart on the product page.

The next two settings, Enable selling downloadable products and Download key TTL, are closely related. The first allows selling digital products such as films, books, and video games in the professional ecommerce solution. And second sets for how long the download key for a digital product is valid. By the way to make keys last infinitely leave the field empty.

Low stock notification threshold. The number in the related field defines when a notification is sent to a store administrator to warn him or her about low stock.

Show products from subcategories of the selected category. If the setting is enabled all products assigned to subcategories are displayed at the main category page on the storefront. Otherwise the products are displayed only on subcategory pages of the ecommerce website software builder.

Then, there is the setting called Display modifiers for product options. This requires some clarification. Options are additional features or accessories that go together with the main product. Colors and sizes, games that come in a bundle, or additional gamepads — all of these are options. And modifiers are their numeric values. They can be seen at the product page in options section. Be careful because disabling this setting doesn’t mean that they are not applied, it just means that they are not displayed.

Exception style defines how some unavailable product combinations are displayed at the storefront. Hide exception completely hides a combination from a product’s page of the all-in-one ecommerce software. And show warning on exception warns customers that chosen combination is not available.

The last one here is Show out of stock products. Use this to either show or hide products that are not available in the store at the moment.

The next small section is Promotions.

The setting Allow customers to use single discount coupon only explains itself clearly. By enabling this setting an administrator deprives customers from gathering lots of discounts and then buying something with a really big discount. The example of this mechanic is presented in the video. Set up the professional ecommerce solution properly now to avoid troubles in the future.