One key area that owners of ecommerce stores need to be focus on is lowering cart abandonment rates, this means lowering the percentage of users who assemble a cart on your store but ultimately fail to complete the checkout process.

This is a hugely frustrating problem for store owners as the customer has found and engaged with your store but ultimately backed out at the last moment leaving the store owner with no sale to show for their hard work in SEO and marketing.

A recent study by Econsultancy / Toluna found that 25.6% of users surveyed would abandon their cart if they were forced to register for an account with the website:

When setting up an ecommerce store the owner will typically disable anonymous checkout forcing the user to create an account because:

• Create a relationship between customer and store.
• Easier to communicate any shipping / order issues to customer.
• Customer more likely to engage with store in future (products reviews, purchase related products, etc).
• Join store email list.

However adding this additional barrier to checkout is not always the best long term strategy for your store, simply because customers do not like creating an account with a store they may only shop with occasionally.

With that in mind Cart Viper the dnn ecommerce module has a number of settings that allow you to tailor the checkout experience to suite your needs:

• Disable anonymous checkout – user must register for an account before being allowed to checkout.
• Allow anonymous checkout – user can checkout without registering for an account.
• Auto-create user account – user can checkout without registering for an account, but Cart Viper will automatically create them a user account once their order has been placed and email them the login details.

As you can see Cart Viper has every option covered and is the most feature rich ecommerce module available for DNN, please take the free 14 day trial or contact us to discuss how Cart Viper could work for your ecommerce project.

What do printers, mobile phones, video game consoles and razor have in common? They all use the razor blade business model, selling a commodity cheap to generate revenue on complementary products.

The initial cost of purchasing a new printer is tiny compared to the cost of purchasing ink or toner over the life time of the printer.
Its a tried and tested model that works, so long as the original product isn’t modified to cut the manufacturer out of the loop with purchasing the complementary product. If you start using refilled ink or toner the manufacturer loses out on the revenue and its no longer a great deal for them.

So what does any of this have to do with Cart Viper?
Well a common question we get asked is what is our upgrade policy for Cart Viper. Simple, its the opposite of the razor blade model. If you purchase a license you get free lifetime upgrades.

That’s correct, purchase a license and you’ll get access to every release we create in the future. Not just bug fixes, but new features as they become available. All for the single one off license cost.
We have an active road-map of new features, a frequent release cycle and great support, so let us help you with your next ecommerce project.

Ask our competitors about what their upgrade policy is, are they following the razor blade model?

Today we have launched a new feature on the Cart Viper website. We are committed to listen to our customers and we have now made it easier for you to help shape the direction of Cart Viper.

The new road map page allows you to view, vote and comment on tickets which we are working on for future releases.
Do we have a task which is important to you? We want to see your votes and hear your comments.

We’ll be adding more road map details over the coming days

Cart Viper is an ecommerce module for DNN which provides you with the ability to sell anything online, With features you would expect to find in a product costing ten times the price.

Earlier in the month we released version 3.0 of Cart Viper, this contained one of the most significant improvements to Cart Viper - responsive layouts. This fixed a serious short coming with earlier versions of Cart Viper, now with this feature we can format correctly regardless of the size of screen the store is being viewed on.

We already have a head full of ideas for release 3.1 but we want to hear back from you, what features would you prioritize for this release? Perhaps you are using the store and there is a killer feature you think is missing or you tried the store but selected a rivals store based upon some missing functionality?

Either way we are throwing the road map open to the community, please share your ideas with us here or if you prefer email us directly to discuss nigel@cartviper.com. We do value your opinions and are always willing to listen on how we can do things better!

Cart Viper 3.0.0 now has support for responsive layouts, allowing you create a store that works great desktop, tablet and mobile users.

The world of computing is changing, no longer do you need a desktop computer to access the internet. Tablet and mobile devices are growing at an incredible rate.
The challenge to a store owner is how to tap into the market and provide a first class experience for the ever expanding tablet and mobile users. One option is to design a website using responsive layout to allow for an optimum layout and use of space across all devices. Starting in Cart Viper 3.0.0 we are now able to render a store using responsive templates which allow all different devices to browse and checkout from the store.

How to Enable Responsive Templates

1. Log in to the Store Admin page select the Store Info option, from here you will see that their is the ability use the original templates or the new responsive templates.

2. Select the responsive option and the store will now use those to render the page. Additionally you are free to edit the templates to tweak the layout as required.
The responsive templates are located in this folder if you have enabled Portal Templates

/Portals/x/CVStore/ResponsiveTemplates/

Or if you are not using Portal Templates then the files will be in the this location

/DesktopModules/CartViper/ResponsiveTemplates/

Cart Viper is the most cost-efficient and feature rich ecommerce module for DNN, this latest release goes to prove it. Our commit to constant improve means you get the best possible store on the DotNetNuke platform. Take the free 14 day trial and see the benefits Cart Viper can bring to your store.

We may have release version 2.0 of Cart Viper back in July but we are already working on the next major release. Without giving too much away the next major release will enhance a key feature of Cart Viper namely the templates and design your store, that’s all we are going to saying for now.

We have lots of happy customers that use Cart Viper daily in their businesses, we’ve got great reviews on the DNN Store and we have great testimonials but I want to hear from the people that have taken our free trial but then gone on to purchase a competitors product.

Since we are making some major changes to Cart Viper now is the time to let us know about...

• What didn’t work as expected?
• What swung the decision to purchase a competitors product?
• What was missing from our product?

I’m one of the developers of the product and I want to hear from you, I want to improve our product and I need your help to tell me the problem. So if you have tried Cart Viper and have something to share please leave a comment or email me direct at mark@cartviper.com

Today we are happy to announce that version 2.0 of Cart Viper the DNN ecommerce solution is released, this version contains a whole host of new and advanced features including catalog workflow, version history and catalog localization.

Version 2.0 Feature List:

• Add description to product variants.
• Token to output the product facets a given product supports.
• Option to display a price for an RFQ product.
• Allow newsletter module collect customer email addresses without having the newsletter enabled.
• Option to define which of the shipping rates for FedEx, UPS and USPS you would like to use.
• Token to output all sub-categories for a given category.
• Option to make the customer agree to the stores terms and conditions before reaching the checkout page.
• Setting to charge shipping on events products.
• Support for affiliate tracking.
• Edit the store templates directly from the store admin module.
• Allow the admin to define the mappings between the DNN user profile address and the address within Cart Viper.
• Czech Koruna currency support.
• Cart Viper now fully supported on Azure platform.
• Option to upload product images via the standard DNN file picker.
• Create HTML content that can be outputted in a jQuery accordion at the product level.
• Allow products to be tagged using standard DNN taxonomy.
• QuickBook Integration via Atandra T-Hub.
• Product and category localization - display products and categories in multiple languages.
• Integration into Payment express PXPay payment gateway.
• Australian post shipping provider.
• Download events to iCal file.
• Allow the addresses within Cart Viper to be template / token driven so they can be changed to match the format of your country.
• Change buttons from images to text / css buttons.
• Specify at a variant level if a product variant option incurs VAT / tax.
• Product Catalog workflow.
• Version history and ability to rollback to a previous version of the store.
• Authorize.net recurring billing enhancement - manage / cancel subscriptions directly from Cart Viper recieve notifications when a card is declined etc.
• Integration into HSBC CPI payment gateway.

Please feel free to take the free 14 day trial.

Since the release of version 1.4.0 of Cart Viper the DNN shopping cart we have supported the ability to inject skin objects into our template system. We have previously blogged on how you could write your own skin object and provided some sample code to get you started, but today we are going to highlight some real world examples and hopefully give you some ideas that will take your Cart Viper store to the next level!

A newly launched Cart Viper site that has made use of skin objects is the Kaiwaka outdoor clothing store, when we were tasked with creating their website there were 3 items that we could not achieve by modifying our existing templates / CSS alone.

1) Display a banner image based upon the current selected category:

2) Display a product summary when hovering over the product image on the product catalog page:

3) On the product details page display brand and color images specific to the selected product:

The 2 key points to remember when working with skin objects are:

a) They can be loaded on any Cart Viper template.

b) By implementing the interface ICartViperSkinObject in your skin object code, Cart Viper will automatically set either the category or product object that the skin object is loaded in ready for you to access in your code.

Its that simple really to take a standard Cart Viper store and really take it to the next level, all with the power and flexibility that skin objects gives you, we hope this post gives you some inspiration for your sites, so download the sample code and let your imaginations run wild!

If you have any questions about skin objects or anything Cart Viper / DNN related please let us know

We always try to make Cart Viper the DNN Ecommerce module as flexible and up to date as possible, take for example the built-in support we have Google Checkout.
We have a number of customers that are using this payment gateway but unfortunately Google has recently announced that its going to retire its Google Checkout payment processing service on November 20th 2013, meaning any existing customers need to find an alterative payment solution.

So what can you do if you are using Google Checkout? Before November 20th you need to select an other payment gateway that Cart Viper supports and start using that in your store then discontinue using Google Checkout.
Current Cart Viper has support for around 30 different payment gateway providers that you can find listed in the user manual.

Our roadmap also has support for Stripe coming in a future release. We can also create you a payment provider for your chosen gateway if we don’t already support it.

You can read the official announcement from Google about the retirement here https://support.google.com/checkout/sell/answer/3080449