X-Cart:General Options

The 'General settings/General options' page allows you to adjust the general configuration of your store.

Common store options

• Check this to close your shop temporarily: This option allows you to close the storefront when performing maintenance tasks on your store or making changes to your store's settings/configuration. When this option is selected, no one can access the Customer area of your store without a special key.

You can also see if your shop is open or closed at the top of each page in the Admin area:

Important: You should understand that making changes on a live store without closing the storefront may cause temporary inconsistencies in the store's functioning, which may lead to undesirable consequences. For example, if you change the store's tax or shipping settings while some customers are checking out, these customers may get wrong order totals.

While the store is closed, visitors attempting to view any page in the Customer area see X-Cart's 'shop closed' page (shop_closed.html). If you wish to use a different HTML page as your 'shop closed' page, edit the $shop_closed_file variable in the config.php file of your X-Cart installation.

• Key for access to a temporarily closed shop: This field allows you to enter a key that you or the other store staff will be able to use for access to the Customer area while the store is closed. For example, if your store's Customer area home page URL is httр://example.com/xcart/home.php and the key is '123', the Customer area can be accessed by pointing the browser to httр://example.com/xcart/home.php?shopkey=123.

Important: For security reasons, the key must never be the same as the master, FTP or MySQL password.

• If ticked, the categories list always shows root categories: If selected, root categories are shown in the Categories menu of the Customer area regardless of what category level a customer is currently viewing. You can unselect this check box, so the categories list will always show categories available for browsing on the current level.
• Enable default password warning: If selected, a JavaScript warning is displayed to the store users who log in to the store with a password that coincides with the login name. The warning is supposed to be an irritating message that reminds the users of the necessity to change their password.
• Disable anonymous checkout: If selected, checkout is disabled for customers who are not registered/not logged in.
• Enable sign-up for membership: If selected, customers are allowed to sign up for memberships, and administrator moderates the signup process (reviews each customer's application and decides whether the membership should be granted). As a result, customers become members of this or that group only with administrator's approval. You can uncheck this box if you wish to disable membership sign-up for customers (You will still be able to add them to membership groups besides the default group, but it will be outside of the view of your customers).
• Use counties: If selected, use of counties in your store is enabled.
• Use JavaScript version for state and county selector: If selected, a JavaScript version of the state and county selector is enabled for all the forms where users are required to provide a billing/shipping address. You can leave this check box unselected if you do not wish to use the JavaScript version.

How it works with JavaScript version: The JavaScript version of X-Cart's state and county selector provides a mechanism that makes the process of specifying the state/county components of an address more user-friendly.

When a user selects a country from the 'Country' drop-down box in any address form, the JavaScript mechanism ensures that the 'State' drop-down box, from which the user is supposed to select a state, shows not all the states available in the store, but only the states of the country selected from the 'Country' drop-down box. Similarly, in stores that use counties, the list of counties displayed in the 'County' drop-down box includes not all the counties defined in the store, but just the counties of the state selected from the 'State' drop-down box. Please note that the situation described is true only for 1) countries that have their 'has states' check box selected and some states defined; 2) states that have some counties defined. If the user selects a country whose 'has states' box is selected, but for which no states are defined, an input box is provided for the 'State' field, so the customer can type in the name of his or her state manually. If the user selects a country whose 'has states' check box is not selected or a state that does not have any counties defined, the 'State' and 'County' fields are disabled, respectively.

How it works with non-JavaScript version: The 'State' drop-down box provides a list of all the states available in your store (the format of each entry in the list will be 'Country code: State name'). The 'County' drop-down box provides a list of all the counties available in your store in the format 'State name: County name'. Please note that 'has states' check boxes do not affect X-Cart's non-JavaScript state and county selector in any way.

• Redirect customer to cart: If selected, your customers are redirected to the shopping cart page every time they add a product to the shopping cart.
• Return the customer to the dynamic part of the store if the option 'Redirect customer to cart' is disabled and the customer got to the cart page from the HTML-catalog: If selected, a customer who adds a product to the shopping cart from a static HTML catalog page is redirected to the dynamic part of the store. If unselected, the customer is redirected back to the static part of the store.

Note: Using this option makes sense only when the option 'Redirect customer to cart' is disabled.

Reason why you may want to enable this option: Assuming the option 'Redirect customer to cart' is disabled, customers do not get onto their personal cart page after adding a product to cart. When a customer cannot go to the cart page, the only way for him or her to find out how many product items are currently contained in the shopping cart is by looking at the product items counter in the 'Your cart' menu box. As the number of product items displayed in the 'Your cart' menu box can be updated only in a dynamic store, it makes sense to redirect customers to the dynamic part so they can see the updated number of items in their shopping cart.

Reason why you may want to disable this option: Load on the server where your store is installed can be reduced by having customer activity related to browsing categories and products relocated to the static part of your store (thus relieving the PHP and MySQL).

• Allow searching by individual words of a search phrase: If selected, store users (including customers) can specify whether the results returned by a product search should match 'All words', 'Any word' or the 'Exact phrase' of the search pattern. You might want to disable this option if you wish to reduce load on your MySQL server. With this option disabled, search results will include only exact matches of the search pattern.

Default (anonymous) customer options

• Default country: The country used as the country of residence of the default customer and displayed by default in the 'Country' field of user registration/user profile forms.
• Default zipcode: The zip/postal code used as the zip/postal code of the default customer.
• Default state: The state used as the state of residence of the default customer.
• Default city: The city used as the city of residence of the default customer.
• When a customer isn't logged in, it is presumed that he is from the default country: If selected, the location defined by the values of the 'Default country/zipcode/state/city' fields is regarded as the place of residence of any anonymous customer. As a result, customers can get an estimate of shipping and tax costs for their orders even when they are not registered or not logged in. (For an anonymous customer, a shipping cost is calculated based on the shipping rate defined for the destination zone that includes the default customer location and the shipping method selected by the customer from the list of methods available for the default customer location; an applied tax is calculated based on the destination zone that includes the default customer location).

Note: Shipping rate estimates are displayed to anonymous customers only when the 'Fast lane checkout' module is disabled.

General parameters

• Primary currency symbol: The symbol to be used for the primary currency.
• Primary currency display format: The location of the primary currency symbol relative to the amount: before the amount, after the amount, with or without a space between the currency symbol and the amount.
• Alternative currency symbol (empty to disable). Note that credit card charges are made using primary currency: The symbol to be used for the alternative currency. If specified, all the prices in your store will be displayed twice: first in the currency defined as primary, then in the currency defined as alternative.

Note: If you specify an alternative currency symbol, be sure to set an alternative currency exchange rate further in this section.

If you do not wish to use an alternative currency, leave the 'Alternative currency symbol' field blank.

• Alternative currency display format: The location of the alternative currency symbol relative to the amount: before the amount, after the amount, with or without a space between the currency symbol and the amount.

• Alternative currency exchange rate: The conversion rate to be used by X-Cart to convert prices defined in the primary currency to the alternative currency.
• Weight symbol: The symbol to be used for units of weight (like lbs, kg, etc.)
• Grams in the unit of weight defined by the weight symbol: The number of grams in the unit of weight used in your store (X-Cart needs this value to be able to convert weights expressed in the units of weight specified in the 'Weight symbol' field to the units of weight used by specific shipping services like U.S.P.S, FedEx, etc).

Purchase limitations

• Minimum allowed order subtotal: The minimum subtotal amount with which an order is accepted by your store (Customers are not allowed to place orders with a subtotal smaller than this value).
• Maximum allowed order subtotal (0 means no maximum limit): The maximum subtotal amount with which an order is accepted by your store (Customers are not allowed to place orders with a subtotal greater than this value).
• Maximum allowed total quantity of products in an order (0 means no maximum limit): The maximum number of product items a customer is allowed to order at a time (regardless of product titles). For example, if you set this value to 5, and a customer of yours attempts to order three books and three CDs, he or she will not be allowed to place the order.

Inventory options

• Disable inventory tracking: If selected, tracking of the number of product items in stock is disabled. You might want to disable inventory tracking only if the number of items in stock is unlimited for all the products in your store.
• Disable products which are out of stock: If selected, products which are out of stock are not shown to customers.

Payment options

• Do not ask customers to enter CC information while getting registered: If selected, customers are not offered to provide their credit card information at the time of registration (The 'Credit card information' section in the user registration form is disabled).

Note: Enabling this option is strongly recommended.

• Enable 'Issue Number' and 'Valid from' fields in the CC info form: If selected, 'Issue No.' and 'Valid from' fields are included into the 'Credit card information' section.
• Display CVV2 input box at the last stage of checkout if Manual CC processing is used: If selected, an input box for CVV2 is included into the 'Credit card information' section when manual credit card processing is used.
• Enable Credit Card info validation: If selected, a special validation routine performs a preliminary check of compliance of the credit card number, CVV2 and expiration date provided by a customer with several different formatting rules.
• Number of days in advance that you want a reminder to be sent to the Orders department email address about an order in Pre-authorized status for which the authorization period is going to expire: This setting allows you 1) to set up X-Cart to send email notifications to your store's Orders department about orders for which the authorization period is going to expire soon and 2) to specify the number of days before the end of the authorization period that you wish such notifications to be sent. If you do not wish notifications of this kind to be sent, set this value to "0" (zero).

Miscellaneous

• Enable debugging console: If selected, X-Cart's debugging console is enabled. X-Cart's debugging console is a tool that can show the hierarchy of templates on any of the store pages and, when Webmaster mode is enabled, can help you find specific templates. You can enable this option when customizing the look and feel of your store; be sure to disable the debugging console as soon as you finish editing the store templates.
• Enable tracking statistics: If selected, X-Cart gathers tracking statistics for your store ('Top paths through site', 'Top page views' and 'Shopping cart conversion funnel' sections are added to the 'Statistics' section of the Admin area of your store).
• Parse Smarty tags in the content of embedded static pages: If selected, you can use Smarty tags in your embedded static pages. As a result, static pages using Smarty tags are treated not just as plain HTML pages, but as templates.
• The full path to Perl interpreter executable (e.g. WIN32: 'd:\perl\bin\perl.exe'; UNIX: '/usr/bin/perl' or leave this field empty): A full path to the Perl binary; set this value to be able to perform X-Cart upgrades on Windows operating systems.
• Preferred HTTPS module (if not found the first available module will be used): The HTTPS module that you wish to use for sending HTTPS queries (Net::SSLeay, CURL, libCURL, Open SSL executable, HTTPS-cli executable). Make sure the desired module is installed on the server.

Tip: To find out what HTTPS modules are installed, refer to the 'Environment info' section of the Summary page in the Admin area (Administration menu->Summary).

If the module selected to be preferred is unavailable, X-Cart uses the first available HTTPS module that it can find.

• HTTPS proxy: If you are using Curl or LibCurl, enter the HTTPS proxy data in the required format. Some parts may be omitted, the following variants are possible:

username:password@host:port

username:password@host

username@host

username@host:port

host:port

host

If no proxy should be used, leave the field empty.

If you access Internet via proxy and fail to enter the proxy data here, you will not be able to specify external URL addresses for product/category images.

• Allow provider users to edit their Seller Address: This option is available only in X-Cart PRO. Using this option, you as a store administrator can allow/forbid your store's providers to access the Seller Address section in their user profile and edit its contents. If this option is enabled, your store's providers will be able to define the address from which their products will be shipped by themselves; they will also be able to edit this address at any time. If this option is disabled, only you (and other store administrators, if any) will be able to define and edit provider seller addresses.
• Key for launch of the cron.php script: This field allows you to set a key that you will use to launch cron.php from the command line. cron.php is X-Cart's script that launches execution of periodic tasks. The key is needed to prevent unauthorized access to this script. The key must be an alphanumeric code no less than 6 characters in length. After the value entered into this field is saved, X-Cart will automatically generate a command that you will be able to use to launch cron.php from the command line. This command will be displayed below the 'Key for launch of the cron.php script' field like the following:

• Run the script that launches execution of periodic tasks once per N user sessions (Set to 0 or leave empty if you do not wish to use this script): This setting allows you to set up X-Cart to automatically launch the script cron.php once per a predetermined number of user sessions (The desired number of user sessions can be entered into this field).