Love OpenCart! Have questions.

Hi all,

I have been testing all kinds of shopping carts trying to find a perfect match for my needs. I am new to OpenCart, but have been very impressed with it so far. I understand there is no perfect product for everyone, but for me OpanCart seems to be just IT. Kudos to the developers!!!

I am sure I will have more questions, but for now my main ones are as follows:

1. Is there a way to implement a tell a friend feature on product pages? I am selling to a very small niche market, and having this feature would be a great marketing tool.

2. When working with currencies, my understanding is that PayPal converts them to your default account currency using their own rates which of course are set up to provide a little extra for the PayPal. Basically that means that if my default PayPal currency is Euro, as a seller I am loosing some money when selling in USD or GBP. To offset that, I'd like to be able to index my store's exchange rates with say an extra 1%. Now comes the question. If I want to use my own rates, do I have to set them manually every day? If I set rates to update automatically, is there a way to incorporate my extra 1%?

3. I would like to showcase photos of my customers using my products. What would be the recommended way to include a modern looking lightweight easy to set up gallery?

4. Is there a way to include extra fields to the registration form? It would really be fantastic to be able to collect extra information from my customers.

5. Are there any plans for one-click check-out option in the future? Is there is anything to turn my nose up at with the OpenCart, it would be a somewhat lengthy and complicated check-out process. I must admit when I shop online, if I encounter a site that doesn't leave me any other option but to register before check out, I Ctrl-W it and go look somewhere else. Of course that might be just me.

Would appreciate any advice.

I can help you with #1 Tell a Friend
I found this to be the easiest way... Just create a new page and add an iframe tag.

Go to your admin>Catalog>Information>Instert

Now create a new page called 'Tell a Friend'
In the Description box click 'source' and add this text
<iframe scrolling="no" height="370px" frameborder="no" align="right" width="520px" name="frame1" src="http://www.YOUR-DOMAIN.com/tellafriend"> </iframe>

Now upload a tell-a-freind script into your root folder called 'tellafriend' via FTP.

There are plenty of free tell-a-friend scripts out there, or you can p.m. me for the one I use (freewear)

Hope this helps..

Priceyboy

priceyboy wrote: There are plenty of free tell-a-friend scripts out there, or you can p.m. me for the one I use (freewear)

Why not share it here?

oceanview wrote:Hi all,

I have been testing all kinds of shopping carts trying to find a perfect match for my needs. I am new to OpenCart, but have been very impressed with it so far. I understand there is no perfect product for everyone, but for me OpanCart seems to be just IT. Kudos to the developers!!!

Me to, I'm using osCommerce and was looking at PrestaShop but after someone pointed me towards OpenCart I was hooked.

1. Is there a way to implement a tell a friend feature on product pages? I am selling to a very small niche market, and having this feature would be a great marketing tool.

That has been answered I see but my guess is that it will be added as a separate module in the near future.

2. When working with currencies, my understanding is that PayPal converts them to your default account currency using their own rates which of course are set up to provide a little extra for the PayPal. Basically that means that if my default PayPal currency is Euro, as a seller I am loosing some money when selling in USD or GBP. To offset that, I'd like to be able to index my store's exchange rates with say an extra 1%. Now comes the question. If I want to use my own rates, do I have to set them manually every day? If I set rates to update automatically, is there a way to incorporate my extra 1%?

To do this you will have to manualy set your currencies every day.

3. I would like to showcase photos of my customers using my products. What would be the recommended way to include a modern looking lightweight easy to set up gallery?

You probably have to ad a galary-script in the same way as the Tell a friend scriot for now.

4. Is there a way to include extra fields to the registration form? It would really be fantastic to be able to collect extra information from my customers.

This I'm not sure, maybe there is a way but it needs a little or lot of extra coding and db changes. This will make future upgrades more difficult for you.

5. Are there any plans for one-click check-out option in the future? Is there is anything to turn my nose up at with the OpenCart, it would be a somewhat lengthy and complicated check-out process. I must admit when I shop online, if I encounter a site that doesn't leave me any other option but to register before check out, I Ctrl-W it and go look somewhere else. Of course that might be just me.

Would appreciate any advice.

OC has already a very easy and almost one-click check-out if you look at the guest checkout.If I compare it to other carts I've tested I'm not sure what you want to have removed?
I do see some possibility's in the checkout for registered accounts.

I'm supprised that you will rather have a quick checkout than a good deal.

If you have 1.3.3 or 1.3.4 there is guest checkout as mentioned and it is quite streamlined. I like this approach, however I would like to see (as has been discussed previously in another thread) the guest checkout become the only one (other than loggin in of course) with an option to create an account either as a checkmark or on success.