Below we list only the most important features and benefits of WebAsyst Shop-Script.
Shop-Script offers many configuration options which allow easy storefront customization (totally over 150 settings), and we do not list them all here. To see the software in action, sign up for the hosted service (it's free) — you will get your own full-featured online store in a minute.
Administering your shop requires no special skills or programming knowledge. All you need to know is how to use a browser. WebAsyst interface is easy to comprehend and can be used by any one in your team or a company. It was built to be simple and easy to use every day.
WebAsyst software update technology was specifically developed to provide you with the latest updates and additions as soon as they come out. You can always access the latest release on our server. Whether there are security issues to be countered, or minor errors to be fixed, you do not need to play around with patches and install them manually, just use our standard update procedure. Whenever we become aware of issues requiring immediate action, our development team provides solutions quickly and makes them available directly.
Installing a new version release has never been so easy. Just click on “Update installation” link inside the Installer tool, and it will be downloaded and employed by your server automatically. No FTP downloads, no manual unpacking, no correcting your design changes after upgrade — we take care of all of this.
You can turn your WebAsyst Shop-Script into a full-featured intranet system. Functionality of Shop-Script can be extended with other WebAsyst applications that allow you to set up secure online file storage, keep short text notes, create corporate manuals and guides online, store photos and images and share them, keep your clients' contact information, manage issues and projects along with your team. In other words — organize effective collaboration of your company employees or colleagues and partners. Other WebAsyst applications are sold separately to be installed on the same server as Shop-Script.
The installation process is straightforward, and once it is complete you can start working — choose a design template, add your products, accept orders.
WebAsyst Shop-Script is used by more than 5000 online stores in more than 90 countries around the world. Our software has all features necessary to start selling without having to deal with technicalities and coding. WebAsyst Shop-Script includes features that our current clients requested, making it practical, powerful, and easy to use for everyday online commerce tasks. Our product is well scalable and is suitable for selling a single item or for a catalog containing thousands of products with hundreds of orders everyday.
WebAsyst Shop-Script provides two different ways to offer your products — through your dedicated online storefront and using widgets.
Storefront is a well known model, where you have a web site dedicated to your products, presenting them in a structured way. Site visitors add products to a cart and place orders. The owner of the store is notified via email or SMS about new orders and processes them in the administrative backend. Take a look at our demo store (opens in a new window).
Widgets — a new sales tool that allows you to add the ability to order your products from any(!) web page or a blog. Widget is basically a piece of HTML-code embedded to your other sites showing product info and an "Add to cart" button, and providing connection to your online store to process such orders. Site visitors will not have to enter online store to place an order. More about widgets.
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WebAsyst Shop-Script is based on PHP and MySQL. We release entire codebase to our clients (no code encryption or obfuscation) making customization virtually limitless.
You do not need to know single command in PHP or HTML to work with WebAsyst Shop-Script. All you need is a web browser and to follow installation instructions. Only if present functionality is unsuitable for some reason, or if you require customization for a particular purpose (e.g. integrating missing payment module), would you need programming skills. You can change the look of your store by using the built in visual theme editor. Most editing is done by dragging-and-dropping of the page elements, and element properties (e.g. color or placement) are edited in pop-up menus. You also have full control of page elements through direct editing of cascading style sheet (CSS) files.
WebAsyst Shop-Script can be successfully installed in most server configurations and has been thoroughly tested in different environments. Scripts can be executed under both Apache and IIS running under Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, Mac OS operation systems.
We constantly keep track of newly discovered vulnerabilities and exploits by testing them against our software. This is an ongoing and repetitive process, both during development and after releasing. We use widely recognized scanner software, collect abuse reports from our extensive clients base, and take swift action in case of any security breach. Updates are issued within several hours, and become available immediately through standard script upgrade tools.
Design and LocalizationWebAsyst Shop-Script comes with 19 ready-to-use storefront templates. Each of them can be used as is, or modified to your liking.
Storefront and backend pages look identical in all major browsers. Users with disabled JavaScript are also able to view and order products from your store; however, some of the graphic effects and AJAX functionality will be absent.
Your WebAsyst Shop-Script based Internet store can be presented in several languages. Visitors are allowed to choose a preferred language on any page, and search engines will index all language versions of the site as different pages. You can translate everything — product names and description, main menu, information pages etc. All of the text messages are stored in UTF-8 encoding, making translation of them to German, Arabic, Chinese, or any other language easy. Localization is done with standard administrative tools.
Detailed product descriptions, info pages, news posts are edited using built in WYSIWYG-editor. This allows you to apply rich formatting easily without HTML knowledge. WebAsyst uses TinyMCE editor.
You only need a browser and access to the administrative account to change the look of your store. Drag and drop page elements to rearrange them, double-click on them to change their properties. If you need to do more, you can always make changes to CSS stylesheets or embed arbitrary HTML code into the pages. Take a look at this video of the editing process.
Smarty template engine is still used too.
Your store front end will appear correctly on the internet enabled mobile devices, allowing your customers to browse and place orders without connecting to it from a desktop. Handhelds, iPhone and iPod will present properly formatted page and let their owners to place orders.
← Here is an example of mobile interface of the front page (click to enlarge).
See it to believe by connecting to http://demo.webasyst.net/shop/ from your mobile.
StorefrontThe major goal of an Internet store (or any site for that matter) is to make visitors feel at ease and comfortable while shopping. We have created the front end of the store keeping this in mind. WebAsyst Shop-Script's interface is as simple as it can possibly be. Your clients will not have to think twice about how to find a product or place an order. Your goods are presented in a neat and straightforward manner.
Average page generation time on most hardware is in the range of between one-tenth to one-half of a second. Of course this time may vary depending on actual server characteristics and number of simultaneous connections, but WebAsyst Shop-Script allows you to have a “thousand customers a day” site even on a shared hosting plan.
Finding what they are looking for is very easy for your customers, and there are several ways to do it. There is a standard tree like catalog of goods, simple name and description search. More advanced options include a parameter filtered search and a tag cloud.
Conveniently placed informational pages, a news column, a summary of cart contents and personal account entry form are placed where visitors are used to see them. This saves buyers time, and removes the learning curve from the shopping process.
Your store's visitors can mark a number of products on the page and compare them in a table. This is especially useful for items with multiple features and characteristics, e.g. digital cameras, cellular phones, or computers.
Your store visitors can voice their opinion on certain products, rate them, or follow RSS feeds of others opinions. Engage your shoppers to make a better experience for all site's visitors.
WebAsyst Shop-Script generated pages are optimized for indexation by search engines such as Google. Pages are not overburdened with irrelevant information, all of the product info is properly structured into paragraphs, heading tags are used on the crucial pieces of information, images have their “alt” property filled with product names as well as page titles. If standard handling is not sufficient for your situation, WebAsyst Shop-Script allows you to set title, meta keywords, and meta description tag values for each page separately.
Using two or more interface languages will not hinder the index process, and all nationalized versions will be taken into account.
Store back-end offers on-demand XML Sitemaps creation feature. Sitemaps file lists URLs of your website and allows search engines to crawl your site more intelligently.
Store pages have comprehensible addresses that are easy to remember; e.g., www.mystore.com/product/apple-ipod/, www.mystore.com/category/computers/. This helps your users to understand the site's structure and memorize direct links, and is kindly taken by search engines, because pages with relevant words in their address are rated higher.
Image of a product is your best selling tool. Words cannot describe an item better than a picture to potential buyers. WebAsyst provides stunning image presentation functionality. You can assign an unlimited number of images to any product, and all of them will be shown on its page. A click on an image will enlarge it and show navigation controls without page reload. To see for yourself, take a look at an example on the left or this page Nikon D300.
Each product can have an unlimited number of other products associated with it. For example, you can offer accessories or extensions to a base product by providing direct links to them on a product page. See how different sets of optics are offered along with Nikon D300 in our demo store.
Product pages have built in feedback form that can be used by site visitors to place a request for its availability or additional information. There is also a general feedback form that can be accessed from any page of the store.
Order placement process is broken down into several steps, making it easy to use and hard for your customers to get lost. Current stage (customer info entry form, delivery method choice, payment) is always visible on the time line. These pages are simple, do not distract your customer, and contain only relevant fields and choices to keep him focused on order finalization.
Shopping cart content details are presented on top of faded out general page information. The cart has a list of goods in it, current total, and a large “Place order button”.
WebAsyst Shop-Script allows visitors to create permanent accounts in the store. Registered users can keep and reuse their contact info, view their order histories, and manage their accounts.
The order's state can be checked by the customer using front end tracking feature, or the administrator can send automatic emails upon each step of the process.
All of the front end user forms are protected with captcha, requiring a real human to recognize and enter information shown on a distorted machine unreadable image.
You can add an unlimited number of general information pages to your store. For example you may want to have “About us”, “Shipping and payment methods”, “Customer of the month” pages. Some of the sections are already present; e.g., news with RSS feed functionality, price list which contains all your products with their prices, and inventory on hand values.
Shoppers can choose a preferred interface language and currency from the list of options predefined by the store's owner, making your ecommerce site entirely international.
A separate section of the store allows you to collect links to other resources which want to exchange links with you. This helps to raise your page rank. Once a link is posted, it must be approved by the owner of the store and placed into appropriate category.
Customers and orders
If turned on, both are sent immediately as order is placed. This allows you to be constantly informed of new orders and react to them promptly even if you are away from your computer. SMS notifications are sent through one of the gateway servers provided by Clickatell or SMS Driver. To enable this functionality you must sign up for an account with one of the mentioned systems. If you are using WebAsyst Shop-Script hosted service, you do not need to sign up for an account with SMS gateway provider. Average price for sending a single SMS message is 5 – 10 cents (US).
Processing orders and contacting customers are tasks performed every day. WebAsyst Shop-Script was created with that in mind. Order and customer management tasks are easy to perform and require no special skills.
Every registered user has a profile where his personal information is stored. This includes customer's contact info, delivery and billing addresses, order history, and total cumulative amount of purchases.
You can create groups and assign registered clients to them. Each group can be given a percentage discount on purchases. Customers can be moved from one group to another.
WebAsyst can export its catalog data to CSV format file, readable by electronic spreadsheet software. There you can edit it, analyze, or prepare it for import into other applications.
Specific part of the administrative backend is dedicated to order management. All new orders are shown in a color coded list. You can assign different color and font formatting for each order status. Selected order can be set in process status, edited, canceled, and commented on or changed to any of the custom statuses you have set up. Every action can be accompanied by an email notification to the customer.
WebAsyst Shop-Script tracks history of order changes that can be later accessed by an administrator or a customer.
Printable invoices are available online from both back-end (for store administrators) and storefront (for customers in "My account" and "My order status" pages).
You can place orders on behalf of the customer. This is a convenient way to process phone orders.
Any of the order properties (e.g. delivery address, contents, total amount, discount amount, shipping charge) can be edited later by administrator.
WebAsyst Shop-Script integrates Google Maps ability to look up locations and obtain directions. This is a great tool for stores in large cities with their own courier delivery services.
Store owners can track their business progress with the help of graphic reports showing sales for a given period of time, most popular products, most viewed categories, and products placed into a cart most often.
WebAsyst Shop-Script integrates Google Analytics tracking code that provides site owners with a vast volume of statistics on visitors and their behavior patterns. Enter your Google tracking code in the settings of the store to enable Google Analytics.
Payment, shipping and taxWebAsyst Shop-Script is integrated with Google Checkout, PayPal, PayPal Express Checkout and many popular payment gateways. Shop-Script handles the technical part of integration — to start accepting payments you only have to enter the account credentials which you obtained from payment gateway. More about integrations.
Full support for sales tax. You can define tax rates by countries, states, and ZIP code masks. Assign individual products to different tax classes.
WebAsyst Shop-Script offers support for real-time shipping estimates with following carriers:
Products
WebAsyst Shop-Script allows you to use basic product record fields such as name, description, title, META keywords and META description, in stock quantity, price and so on. In addition to pre-set characteristic fields, you can create any number of your own. For example, a clothing store might need color and size fields, cellular phones – prepaid plan field, computer store – processor and graphics card type. Values of these fields can be unique for each product in the catalog or chosen from a predefined list of possible values.
Just like names and description, these additional fields can be shown in several languages.
Any product can have an unlimited number of images attached to it for its proper presentation. Image can be uploaded from your computer or accessed by specifying its URL. Added images will be processed to create a thumbnail and a medium-sized version of them.
ou can sell products that may have some of their properties chosen or defined by a customer. This functionality can change final price of the product based on the custom options selected. For example you can create a single T-shirt item and assign to it a selectable (S,M,L,XL,XXL) size property, or offer a cellular phone with different pre-paid plans. Take a look at an example here — MacBook Pro notebook or here — Nikon D300 camera.
With WebAsyst Shop-Script you can sell digital content of any nature — music, software, images, e-books etc. Files with content need to be uploaded to the WebAsyst Shop-Script installation server and associated with respective catalog items. Customer receives a download link right after order placement. This link becomes active once the store administrator or payment module changes an order status to “Paid”.
The potential number of products in your WebAsyst Shop-Script store is limited only by your hosting server capabilities. We have successfully tested Shop-Script on a dedicated server with a 1 million (!) products in its database, located in
Virtual shared hosting accounts are suitable for stores with several thousand items. If you plan to use WebAsyst Shop-Script with more than
Products are grouped in categories which can include subcategories. There is no limitation on the depth of the tree structure. This is a widely accepted and simple to understand method of organization for your customers.
You can assign a single product to several categories. This is useful if you need several structures in your catalog. For example, in an online drug store you may need two root categories – alphabetical and illnesses. Each of them containing entire list of your products grouped in a different manner.
This is another way to categorize your products. You can assign a set of arbitrary “tags” describing each product. For example Apple iPod can be tagged with “music”, “mp3”, “player”, and “apple”. Your store's visitors can use an automatically generated tag cloud to access all products tagged with a specific term. See an example of the tag cloud in the image on the right.
Every product has an in stock quantity that will be automatically updated if it is ordered, sold or returned due to order being canceled.
You can import a list of your goods from a CSV (Comma Separated Values) formatted file. It is convenient when a large number of products need to be added or updated at once.
You can also export your catalog to CSV from WebAsyst Shop-Script.
WebAsyst Shop-Script has a built in capability to prepare your products list in a format required for exporting to Google Base. You can choose necessary categories and currency before creating the file.
MarketingVery powerful tools which allow you to embed shopping cart features into any website or blog. More about widgets.
Ask your customers to sell your products and motivate them with commissions. Your Affiliates will attract new customers and receive a percentage of sales attributable to them. Any registered customer can become an affiliate partner. You provide them with a special link to your store, they publish it on own resources (a blog, personal pages, sites they own) and any purchases made by referred visitors will be counted towards commission for the partner. WebAsyst Shop-Script keeps track of such referred sales automatically.
This is a great tool to increase your page rank by increasing number of sites referring to yours.
News added to your store can be mailed to the registered customers. This is done automatically by choosing appropriate option at the time of publication.
WebAsyst Shop-Script allows you to set up different discounts based on single order amount, registered user group, or running total for all previous orders. First is applied if current customer order is over a certain predefined amount. Second is applied when customer has registered and has been added to a certain customer group by you. The last one is applied if total of the current and all previous orders of the registered customer exceeds a certain amount. This can be used to provide different pricing to your retail and wholesale customers, or entice customers to return once again.
This is basically a code issued by the store administrator to be entered during order placement. This code can be valid for a single or multiple orders. Applicable discount can be set as a percentage of order amount or a fixed sum.
Every item in your store can have a number of “recommended” products associated with it. Direct links to their respective pages will be presented in the frontend detailed product view.
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