Loyalty & Retention

Hello, Roxanne!



There is the News&E-mails add-on in CS-Cart which allows you to send different newsletters. You can send them to your subscribers or to registered users (you can choose the ones with the concrete location or those who purchased the particular products) or to the visitors who added some products to cart, but did not place an order.

Roxanne,



You honestly can’t really compare magento and cs-cart. Cs-cart is an easy to use, pretty light, and a GREAT package for the price. I mean, there are carts costing 5 to 10 times as much that are not as good.



All in all, you can have a cs-cart shop up & running on a very limited budget (free, even if you use the community version). If you are handy with computers, know your way around FTP and stuff, you will be able to install and run a cs-cart shop yourself. Maybe with some support from the forum - the community is great here!



Magento however, that’s a whole other ballgame. If you have 15 to 20k laying around, you can build a nice magento website and expect another 10k or so per year for editing and development plus the costs for a dedicated server (Magento is super slow and server heavy). Don’t even think about trying this yourself if you don’t have experience… you will be dependant on your webdeveloper – which is i think, a horrible thing for a small business owner.



Magento understands it’s marketing though. They are everywhere. And this is one thing cs-cart doesn’t really seem to get. I’m sorry cs-cart team, but you are doing a terrible job promoting your wonderful product. you are thinking short term and not getting the big picture. For example, why are there no plugins for any major program like Xero, Capsule CRM, Mailchimp, Kashflow, etc. I really don’t get this. You could have your product on all their pages - for the cost of some development that you can do in house!- which would make the best PR ever.



You see, if someone uses Xero, or Capsule CRM. (I use both), or whatever and they see that cs-cart works with them… they are bound to go to cs-cart.com to check out this awesome shopping cart that can do just about everything for a fraction of the cost and with great ease of use. And then… they just might become a cs-cart customer. Because cs-cart certainly kicks oscommerce, oxid, prestashop, etc’s butt!



But back to you. What you are asking, is very basic email marketing. Cs-cart does have a newsletter option but lacks some features other carts have. This is hardly a disaster though. There are services like Mailchimp who do and will do this 1000 times better then any shopping cart will ever do. Most important is that they work very hard (and closely together with providers) to make sure your mail won’t be seen as spam.



Luckily, we have developers here that make great add-ons for little money. Check out this integration for example… which hooks up mailchimp to cs-cart and let’s you segment the hell out of your customers: http://www.ez-ms.com…ntegration.html



Cs-cart also has loyalty (reward) points that work great.



I know there are people working on a Xero connection for Accounting too. And I’m working on a CRM module, which connects Capsule CRM to my shop and mailchimp. Capsule connects to Xero again, and shows customer data straight in gmail / google apps… so I’m hoping this will almost be like a full blown ERP program - but then with good looks and ease if use! :)



So in the end, it’s really what you want, can spend, and expect…

Do you want an easy to use, cheap, full blown shopping cart - cs-cart is great.



Are you expecting to run a huge business, do you want many connections with other services - then Magento is more flexible. But also a lot more expensive and difficult to run.



My link to Capsule crm. - if anybody signs up, I’d appreciate it if you do it through this link :)

Hi Kate,

In CS-Cart v2, In addition to sending newsletters to the subscribers of my mailing list, I used to have the option to select my “Customers” (all of them) as the recipient of the Newsletters.

In v3 I can only select customers with abandonded carts or wishlists.

Is there a way to send to ALL my customers? or do I have to manually add all 1000 users to the mailing list (40 at a time), for each Newsletter?

Hello!



In CS-Cart v.3 there is the Users section on the newsletter editing page. There you can click on the Add users link and add all the users at once.

Thanks for the answer Kate!

With a limit of 100 users per page, it's a little inconvenient to add 1000 users. It requires 10 page views to add them all. (I can't image how a store with 10,000 customers is going to do this.) - but at least the function is there, no matter how inconvenient it is.

A simple Send to “All Customers” / “All Users” dropdown would be nice. Version 2 used to have this.

[quote name='Magpie Don' timestamp='1347468420' post='144886']

Thanks for the answer Kate!

With a limit of 100 users per page, it's a little inconvenient to add 1000 users. It requires 10 page views to add them all. (I can't image how a store with 10,000 customers is going to do this.) - but at least the function is there, no matter how inconvenient it is.

A simple Send to “All Customers” / “All Users” dropdown would be nice. Version 2 used to have this.

[/quote]



A workround is, if you right click on the link that says 100 users , copy the link address, paste into browser and change the 100 at the end of the address to 1000,



John

Nice. That works. Thank you.

[quote name='Magpie Don' timestamp='1347468420' post='144886'] Thanks for the answer Kate! With a limit of 100 users per page, it's a little inconvenient to add 1000 users. It requires 10 page views to add them all. (I can't image how a store with 10,000 customers is going to do this.) - but at least the function is there, no matter how inconvenient it is. A simple Send to “All Customers” / “All Users” dropdown would be nice. Version 2 used to have this. [/quote]



I'm running 2.2.4 and I can't seem to find where I can send one of my newsletter to everyone. Since transferring to cs-cart the mailing list wasn't transferred so having to go through thousands one at a time and add them is what I've been doing. Where is this magical “Send all” thing?

Hello!

We are glad to introduce you the Loyalty Program add-on that allows to automatically assign user groups depending on the purchase total. The discussion is here.

Cs-Cart users,

Pay attention to our free CS-Cart module "Loyalty bonus".

Best regards, Alt-team.

Hmmm.

Are you CS-Cart guys considering deprecating the included ( free ) Reward Points add on ??

Sure this new Loyalty Program may have more bells and whistles but your current Reward Points add on is a main part of the glue binding me to CS-Cart.

Hmmm.

Are you CS-Cart guys considering deprecating the included ( free ) Reward Points add on ??

Sure this new Loyalty Program may have more bells and whistles but your current Reward Points add on is a main part of the glue binding me to CS-Cart.

No, we are not considering to deprecate it.

Reward Points will remain in CS-Cart core.