The vast majority of these features are UNIQUE to congocart and are NOT found combined on any other cart.
- E-Products, with secure single use urls, expiration, and multi-format versions (i.e Book: pdf, epub, doc)
- Mini-site system, you can embed a product banner for your site on any number of forums, blogs or other places on the web. Mini-Sites are so dynamic that each person CAN see a different product if you choose.
- Complete Paypal Integration
Our software not only allows the seller to have the money sent to either a business AND/OR a funded accounts, but any joint stores orders the client only pays ONCE to the Congo, and then the software automatically splits the money up to the proper stores (& removes any Paypal fees) and automatically TRANSFERS to the stores funded account the proper amount. All totally automatic, and hassle free. The system is smart enough to know how to direct the payment automatically!
- Paypal Notification
Our software also tracks the status of the order from Paypal, and automatically marks orders as paid even if the payment went to your funded or business account instead of the congo account! The system also knows to notify the customer if it hasn't got paid, to allow them to "finish" the payment option or just to cancel the order. And pending the customer doesn't do anything, the order is AUTOMATICALLY (optional) cancelled and restocked after the set time frame and notice.
- Blog
Integrated blog that supports store and/or site wide blogs
- Customer Modifications
Ability to restrict them from certain payment options, or increase their "security" to allow them to see products/auctions generally not available to others. (I.e. wholesale, or customer appreciation sales)
- Order Status Notifications
CongoCart automatically sends the store owner a status of all paid orders daily. Once you mark it as shipped (which allows you to also put in tracking #'s) that order is removed from your daily status.
- Froogle / Google Integration
CongoCart software automatically nightly submits ALL currently active and in stock products to Froogle, allowing you an even wider exposure of your products. It also uploads weekly a sitemap to Google to allow better indexing of the products on your site.
- Shipping System
Ability to choose between several internal calculations, a zones based system or have custom shipping added like pulling fees from Australian Post, etc.
- Unlimited Products, Auctions, customizations.
Their is NO limit to the number of Products or Auctions you list on our software.
- NO ADDITIONAL FEES
You know exactly what you are paying, we don't ding you for 100 auctions, 100 products, 500 images, or bandwidth. You pay a SINGLE hosting fee per month. Its that simple.
- Two Types of Auctions Supported
System allows you to choose the type of auction you want; not only is the EBay Proxy method supported, but we also have the highest bidder method.
- Custom options on Products that can adjust the price up or down.
You can have selects, checkboxes, radio buttons or even free form text on each product. And any options you add can adjust the price up or down. For instance you can have it where Blue Large shirts cost +$2.00 an Red Small shirts are -$1.00 from the base product.
- Complete Image management, including automatic image resizing.
All products, and auctions allow you to upload your FULL size unmodified images, and our software AUTOMATICALLY creates several other images. It creates a Thumbnail for optimized loading, then creates a medium image for the pages that you want it on, and also keeps the FULL size image so that people can see the fully detailed product. It also keeps the aspect ratio and causes your site to be quite uniformed. All this is totally automatic, and you don't have to do anything but upload the image. This is a HUGE time saver!
- Built in About Page
You can have your own page that gives information about you. It supports images, on/off about pages (i.e. you can have a vacation page for when you go on vacation, etc).
- Unlimited Galleries
Simple gallery system that allows you to have unlimited number of galleries, and you can easily link ANY product/auction picture you have uploaded prior to a gallery. The galleries allow you to have captions under them, if you so desire and allow quick navigation between them.
- Unlimited Images
You can have unlimited images on a Auction, Product or in your Galleries. The system has no limits, no additional fees, and you can link images to multiple products, auctions or galleries easily.
- Statistics
The system keeps stats about how many views, adds to carts, purchases, bids, and plenty of other statistics you might find handy to figure out how to market your products.
- Prize/Hunt built in system
A VERY flexable prize/hunt system. Not only can you create hunt urls for sites NOT running CongoCart, but it has built in hunt system that allows you to have any number of hunts or prizes you want of both your CongoCart site and third party sites. Each prize/hunt can have a maximum number of winners, a date range, automatically be enabled/disabled and a whole slew of other useful features for managing a prize or hunt.
- Random or Specific images can show on products/auctions.
If you have more than one image for a product or auction, you can choose to have the system always show one image as the primary shown image, or have it randomly pick from the images associated with the product/auction to show.
- Automatic Contact Us form, no more spam from the web
The contact us form is automatically generated from your information, nobody knows your email address unless you tell them. This allows you to eliminate the spam, and have a consistant user experience.
- Themes, Categories, and Featured stores systems
You can classify items into Themes (i.e. if you are going to do a specific Holiday stocking) and Categories. Products are supported in Unlimited Categories.
- Random or Specific orders of all Products, Auctions, Notices, Stores (For Congos), etc.
Virtually every bit of information you can put in can have a sort order. By default the system is random; so Person A will see product 1,2,3 and Person B will see Product 2,3,1, and Person C will see 3,2,1. And it just gets better. Once Person B see it in 2,3,1 order, it stays that way the rest of the time he is on the site; so products DON'T move around while the person is viewing the site. But since the sort order is random; no specific item is treated better/worse than another unless YOU set it to be so. Random sorts are always RANDOM in their sort order group also, so if you have 3 products of a Sort order of 5, all three items will be randomly places in that area. This is all transparent to you and the customer.
- Automatic controls to enable, disable, and preview items products and auctions (and others).
Say you always stock at 3pm on Wed. You can add products to your store through out the week, make sure they look nice and then at 3pm on Wed, the system can AUTOMATICALLY enable, disable or set them to preview mode. This not only allows you to have a consistant stocking (if you desire), but if you go on vacation or are not around the computer, you don't have to worry about it.
- Automatically returns unsold products back into stock.
Customers not finishing checking out at paypal is a fact of life. However, the software will automatically send that person an email letting them know that they can pay for the product using the following link, or cancel the order. In addition in 24(default) hours the system CAN AUTOMATICALLY cancel the order and return the product to stock.
The system also will return items in peoples carts back into stock if they have not had any activity an appear to have left.
- No duplicate sales
If you say you have one product to sell the cart will only sell one item. Not only can the cart make sure not to oversell the product, but you can have TWO different locking methods.- You can have the product be treated as a Claim ticket, anybody and everybody can grab one; but the first person to actually ENTER the checkout system gets it. The other Claim tickets are discarded.
- You can have the product be treated like a physical item, the FIRST person to add it to their cart owns it. If they leave the site without paying for it; the stocking monkey will automatically return it back into stock after about 5 minutes of inactivity so that someone else can purchase it.
- Complete Templating System
System is designed to look the way you want it; not have you mold your look around it. Not only can you make the software look or act the way you want; but if you already have an existing look you want the site to look like (including a look on another competitors store); we can make it look and act like it. You are also giving the ability to modify any of the template files so that you can change/update your look at any time.
- Unlimited Users
Even though you only have one store, you can have an unlimited number of users that can manage that store. This allows you to have several people who may stock items; or maybe you have someone you want to only be able to fullfill orders. You have full ability to add/delete users of your store and assign them a full range of security rights.
- Integrated Flexible discount system.
What can we say; people love discounts. Our system allows you several ways of adding discounts. You can do it by product, your full store, by a $ in cart amount, a code, from a website(banner ad), or even a time frame. In addition you can even Combine or have Exclusive discounts that cancel each other out so that the customer gets a specific set of discounts but can't keep stacking different discounts.
- Site Wide Images Easily upload/remove any site wide images (i.e. for your site look, or any other image you might need hosted).
- Calendar
Integrated Calendar, you can add dates, or date ranges and it will show up on your own calendar.
- Banners
Integrated Banner system, if you want to host banners on your site. You just upload the banner and tell it where you want it to go, and it will tell you how many times it showed the banner and how many clicks it got.
- Mass Emails
You can send mass email announcements to your customer, include automatic form fields.
- FREE Contests
Your site (if you want) will be included for free in the CongoCart network wide contests.
- FREE Banner Ad
Will automatically be added on this site.
- And many more standard features exist and are being added frequently...
Congo Only Features
- Unlimited Stores
Each store is treated totally separately. If store 1 uploads products, auctions and pictures it is treated separately then store 2's products, auctions and pictures. This allows each store to manage their stuff and NOT get confused by what others are doing.
- Combined Shopping Cart for all Stores
All products to the customer are treated the same, to them it is coming from your site. The system handles all the complexity behind the scenes to handle each stores part of the order. Your customers need not even know that the product is coming from multiple stores if you don't want them to.
We are constantly improving the product and have several more features already being designed and implemented and will be showing on this pages in the next couple weeks.