Although ProductCart is great for all industries, it is especially great for the outdoor and sporting goods industry. Outdoor and Sporting goods have broad  categories that cover a lot of different outdoor activities including fishing, golfing, surfing, and horseback riding. As you can see those categories don’t have much in common. ProductCart is so versatile, it is capable of supporting all different types of products from the same store. Some features that help support so many different products are the inventory settings, search options, shipping options, and our conflict management add-on.

Inventory Settings

ProductCart is capable of managing an unlimited number of products. With sports, this is great because one sport alone can have over 1,000 different accessories and equipment. Your store also has the capability of handling out of stock products. Your store can either give an “out of stock” message, or allow customers to purchase items out of stock. If your store lets customers make purchases on backorder, you can give your customers the option of waiting to receive their order in full or if they want it in multiple shipments. ProductCart is so advanced it will notify customers via email and manage the settings in your admin console.

Search Options

Again, complex product catalogs can be too much for some ecommerce software. ProductCart’s search features let you easily guide and direct your customers directly to the products they are interested in. Consumers will leave your site if they can’t locate what they are looking for. You don’t want to put any barriers between customers and your products. Use our advanced categories setting to show/ hide category drop-down on the search page. You can also include/ exclude sub-categories in a category-specific search, which allows for faster search results. Assigning products to multiple categories will allow your customers to find your products without difficulty. Here is an example of a live search filter:

Custom Search Options

Understanding your customers is key to being successful. If you know some of the search terms that customers will use to identify your products, you can create custom search fields to help your customers narrow down your products. For example, if you are a wine store, the older the wine, the higher value it has in most cases. If you know your customers will search by dates of wine, you can create a custom field allowing them to do this. Here is some more information about custom search fields.

Shipping Options

ProductCart supports UPS, USPS, FedEx, and CanadaPost. You also have the capability to print UPS and FedEx labels right from your ProductCart control panel. Outdoor gear comes in all different sizes. As small as a golf tee to as large as a boat. You can customize you shipping options to be based on weight, quantity, order amount, and incremental values. You can also offer different shipping lengths like Next Day and Rush Order shipping. The customization list goes on and on; you can offer certain customers different shipping options, store billing and shipping addresses, add handling fees as a separate charge, and flag products as over sized.

Conflict Management Add-On

Some sporting goods products can be customize to order per customer. If you sell custom products, our Conflict Management Add-On is a great feature for you store. This add-on allows you to create rules to your products before they are added to the shopping cart. For example, fishing kayaks are sometimes custom made. This feature lets customers choose what additional accessories they want to add to their kayak. If your products are complicated, this add-on allows you to create an unlimited number of rules to enforce the selections that your customers make. Here is a live demo of this feature.

For more information about ProductCart and some of its features click here.