Shopping Cart Features

Mailing Lists/Autoresponders

Affiliate Program Manager

Plans and Fees

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Shopping Cart Feature Descriptions

Shopping Cart

Secure Shopping Cart

Information flowing to and from your customers’ computers, the Professional Cart Solutions server, your merchant account, and  your computer is completely secure and cannot be read by any third party.
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Integrates Easily into Any Web Site

Professional Cart Solutions integrates with your web site using simple, plain vanilla hyperlinks. You create catalog pages on one site or many different sites with information about each of your products or services. The look and functionality of your catalog pages is entirely under your control. Once your pages are set up, you add buttons or text to act as “Buy Me” links. Our system provides you with a unique link to use for each product or service. Add this link to the “Buy Me” button or text on your site and you’re ready to take orders. 
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Customized Look and Feel

Professional Cart Solutions offers you maximum flexibility over your e-commerce site’s appearance. You can change the appearance of the cart and forms to match your site by adding images, text, or custom colors. Your customized look and feel will appear on every shopping cart page that your clients will see.
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Integrates with Our Merchant Account

Professional Cart Solutions is compatible with multiple payment options, but the easiest way to accept credit cards is with a Practice Pay Solutions merchant account. Our shopping cart will authorize and process credit card payments in real time and deposit the funds to your checking account automatically. You’ll get the same great service for both your merchant account and your shopping cart, plus take advantage of our special bonus when you purchase a shopping cart and merchant account at the same time. Find out more about the Practice Pay merchant account here.
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Fraud Detection Suite Integration

Professional Cart Solutions is compatible with the Fraud Detection Suite available with your Practice Pay Solutions merchant account. This customizable solution arms merchants with advanced filters and tools to combat the most common types of online transaction fraud facing merchants today. Find out more about the Fraud Detection Suite here.
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Compatible with All Major Payment Gateways

Professional Cart Solutions is compatible with all of these online credit card processing options:

* These options are 3rd-party processors rather than payment gateways. Your customer will leave your shopping cart to make payment, then be automatically returned to complete their transaction.
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Unlimited Product Database

Professional Cart Solutions allows you to offer an unlimited number of products and services in your product database. These can be tangible products, info-products, educational programs, memberships, or service packages.
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Upload/Download Product Details

When you have a large product line, Professional Cart Solutions allows you to upload all your product information in one batch or download it for other uses. For example, if you have a pricing change, you could download your entire product database into a spreadsheet, change all the prices according to a formula, and upload the changed product details back into the system.  
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Live Support

Professional Cart Solutions provides unlimited live telephone support for every plan we offer. (Phone support is free, but you will be responsible for any toll charges to call our support center in Canada.) We also provide email support, a complete user guide, online tutorials, and a searchable knowledge base, all absolutely free. With our special bonus when you purchase a shopping cart and merchant account at the same time, you also receive a free consultation with an e-commerce consultant (appointment required).
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Affordable Custom Programming

Our shopping cart offers a wide variety of customizable features that you can set up yourself with our easy-to-use web interface and comprehensive documentation. If you prefer to have this work done for you so you can be up and running without the learning curve, you can hire a cart technician to help you. We make our cart technicians available to you at our cost.
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Email Marketing

Unlimited Autoresponders

An autoresponder is an automated email that is sent in response to an entry on a web form or an incoming email to a special address. Unlike other services, Professional Cart Solutions offers you an unlimited number of autoresponders for as many different purposes as you like. For example, you might have one autoresponder for prospects to get more information on your products and services, one for people who wish to subscribe to your ezine, and another for clients who purchase a particular product so you can follow up with them for repeat sales.
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An autoresponder can contain just one message or a whole series to be sent over a period of time. You can offer an ecourse with the lessons delivered by autoresponder once per week, or send periodic messages to your affiliates suggesting how they can sell more of your products and services. Autoresponders are a powerful tool for enhancing your Internet business. You could easily spend twice what we charge on other autoresponder systems alone, and we include ours with our shopping cart at no extra charge (or you can purchase it separately if you prefer).
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Numerous Ways to Trigger

Our autoresponders can be triggered in many ways. They can be sent by:

• Sending an email to the autoresponder’s unique email address. Professional Cart Solutions generates a unique email address for each autoresponder you set up. Clients can send an email directly to that email address to subscribe, and you will get a copy of the email they sent. The client will receive the autoresponder messages as if you were sending them out by hand every day.  
• Submitting a web form. The system generates standard Join Our Mailing List Forms and Questionnaire Forms, or you can create Custom Forms. Submitting a form can subscribe clients to a single autoresponder or series, and with Custom Forms you can have one form subscribe a client to multiple autoresponders.  
• Making a purchase through your shopping cart. You can create an autoresponder to be sent after every completed transaction. Follow-up messages to established customers will generate significant profits.
  
• Purchasing a particular item through your shopping cart. You can create a specific autoresponder to be sent only when a particular item is purchased. You could use this feature to have the autoresponder deliver the product itself. For example if you offer a class delivered by email, students would use the shopping cart to register and pay for your ecourse, and the autoresponder would deliver lessons automatically. 
• Joining your affiliates program. You can set up an autoresponder just for your affiliates that includes customized instructions or training on how to market  your product or service. Then follow up with autoresponder messages to maintain their interest in your products and contact with you.
• Manually adding email addresses and subscribing them to an autoresponder. You can subscribe any or all of your clients to an autoresponder from your Professional Cart Solutions account. Or if you have a pre-existing opt-in mailing list, you can upload it to Professional Cart Solutions and subscribe the entire group to an autoresponder. (Requires closed-loop confirmation to comply with Unsolicited Commercial Email regulations.)

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Delivers Ezines and Newsletters

Professional Cart Solutions provides you with a Join Our Mailing List Form that you can set to subscribe clients to any autoresponder. Your autoresponder can thank clients for subscribing and deliver their first issue. Then each week or month, you can use our Broadcast function to send your new issue to everyone subscribed to that autoresponder. Set up these features yourself with our easy-to-use web interface and comprehensive user guide, or hire a cart technician to help you at an affordable rate.
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Default and Custom Sign-Up Forms

Professional Cart Solutions provides a standard Join Our Mailing List Form and Questionnaire Form that you can post on your web site. Ask for just subscriber names and email addresses or request as much information as you would like, including address, phone number, or up to 10 custom fields with questions of your own choosing. When a customer submits the form, the information is stored in your client database, and they can be subscribed to any autoresponder.  The autoresponder can use any of the fields from the questionnaire to personalize your message. You can also use HTML to create a completely custom form to access your client database and autoresponders.
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Sends Broadcast Email

Professional Cart Solutions allows you to send personalized emails to any group of clients you like. You can send thousands of emails with one click to your customers, affiliates, or any group who has opted in to receive mail from you. Our powerful search features allow you to select clients for a broadcast based on location, purchase history, your custom fields, and more. Broadcast email is sent to everyone on the target list at the same time, making it ideal for offering special sales, making product announcements, or communicating with many clients or students at once.
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Personalize Messages

You can personalize your autoresponder or broadcast messages with any of the fields in your client database, including name, company name, city or state, and your custom fields.
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Message Format in Text, HTML or MIME

Your ezine or newsletter, autoresponders, and broadcast emails can be sent in plain text, HTML, or multi-part MIME format. If you choose MIME, you can provide both text and HTML. Our system will first attempt to send your subscribers the HTML version. If they cannot receive HTML emails, it will then send the text version.
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Autoresponder Reports

Our autoresponder reports will list for you all the subscription requests and remove requests you receive, and exactly when the requests were made. You’ll be able to track response to your ads and mailings, and compare subscriptions to orders to determine your conversion rate.
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Tell-a-Friend Form

Professional Cart Solutions gives your visitors a way to recommend your web site to friends by sending an email directly from a form on your site. Our Tell-a-Friend form uses your customized look, asks your site visitors for their name and email address, and allows them to enter up to 10 names and email addresses of their friends.
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Automated Subscription Management

Every autoresponder or broadcast email you send carries a link that clients can use to update their own subscription. They can enter their own email address changes, or unsubscribe themselves if they no longer wish to receive your emails, saving you from making these changes manually.
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Mass Subscribing

Using our search features, you can search for a group of clients based on characteristics such as geographic location or products they have purchased and subscribe them as a group to any autoresponder or series.
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Client Database

Contact Management System

In addition to our shopping cart features, Professional Cart Solutions includes a fully-featured client database. Customers who make purchases through the shopping cart, fill out one of your subscription forms, or become your affiliate will be captured in your client database. You can find out who bought a certain product, who is subscribed to a particular autoresponder, who was added to your database during a specific time, and more.

Clients can be added to your database in six ways:

• Manually entering the record
• Importing existing client records (Requires closed-loop confirmation to comply with Unsolicited Commercial Email regulations.)
• Filling out your Join Our Mailing List, Questionnaire, or Custom Forms
• Sending an email to one of your autoresponders
• Making a purchase through your shopping cart
• Joining your affiliate program

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Extensive Search Capabilities

You can search for groups of clients in a wide variety of ways. With your list of search results, you can send an email broadcast, mass subscribe them to an autoresponder series, download the list to a spreadsheet or external database, delete the records, or unsubscribe them from an autoresponder. Here are all the ways you can search your database:

• By Client Type (prospect, customer, or affiliate)
• By Product Purchased
• By City or State
• By Custom Fields
• By Autoresponder Subscribed To
• By Date Entered
• Using Wildcards (with partial names or addresses)
• Negative Searches (find blanks or everyone NOT in a specified category)

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Import/Export Client Records

Professional Cart Solutions allows you to upload an existing client database or list of opt-in subscribers, or import new client records. (Requires closed-loop confirmation to comply with Unsolicited Commercial Email regulations.) You can also download client database records in comma-delimited text (CSV) or tab-delimited format to use in a spreadsheet, mail merge, or external database.
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Custom Fields

With our Basic or Pro package, you have 10 custom fields available in your client database. You can use them for questions on your Questionnaire Form, shopping cart order form, or Custom Forms, or for additional data you enter directly into the database. When you download records from your client database, the custom fields are included, and you can use them to customize autoresponders or broadcasts. The first 9 fields can be up to 50 characters long, and the 10th field will hold up to 100 lines of text for free-form answers. You can also search on any of the first 9 fields.
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Product and Service Sales

Delivers Ebooks and Info-Products

With the Professional Cart Solutions Pro package, when your customers order a digital product, the system can deliver it automatically. Info-products can include e-books, audios, graphic images, or software. When the customer’s order is approved, s/he is taken immediately to a dynamically-generated page showing download links for the digital products s/he has purchased.  The download page remains available for 24 hours, after which the page is purged. Set up this feature yourself with our easy web interface and detailed instructions, or hire a cart technician to help you at our cost.
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eBook Pro Integration

If you use the ebook licensing system eBook Pro, you can integrate it with your shopping cart for secure, automated sales of your digital products. eBook Pro allows you to license your ebooks or other digital products on a customer-by-customer basis to secure them from being illegally copied and distributed.
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Sales Tax Calculation

Professional Cart Solutions offers full support for U.S. state sales taxex, European VAT, Canadian GST/HST/PST, and more. You can easily set tax rates for all states or provinces you do business in. The shopping cart will automatically add the proper tax rates according to the location your customer enters on the order form. You can select whether certain products are subject to taxes, and whether tax rates should include shipping charges. 
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Extensive Shipping Fee Options

Professional Cart Solutions gives you maximum flexibility for charging shipping fees. You may choose not to have any shipping charges for classes, professional services, and info-products the customer will download. Or choose from one of these options:

• Professional Cart Solutions integrates with the UPS, USPS, FedEx, DHL, and Canada Post shipping tables in real time. You can charge shipping according to the weight of the items ordered and the postal code they are being shipped to.
• You can charge shipping as a flat rate per order or a flat rate based on order total.
• You can charge shipping according to the total weight of the items ordered in ounces, kilos, or pounds. You can also charge shipping by weight plus a flat fee.
• Shipping charges can be calculated as a percentage of the order total, or by the number of items ordered.
• You can set a flat rate shipping price for every item. You can also combine this method with one of the previous methods.
• You can offer free shipping for any product, or if the order total exceeds a certain amount.

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Custom Buyer Agreements

Professional Cart Solutions provides a standard buyer agreement on your online order form to reduce chargebacks. This text message asks the customer to agree that “I authorize [your company] to charge me for the above total.” If this text isn’t applicable to your business, you can customize the wording or delete the agreement entirely. 
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Order Notification Emails

Whenever you get a new order, Professional Cart Solutions sends an email receipt to the customer and a notification to you with all the order details except the payment information (email is not a secure transmission method). There’s also an optional secondary order notice address, which you can use to automatically send order notices to your fulfillment house, virtual assistant, or bookkeeper.
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Autoresponse upon Purchase

With the Basic and Pro packages, you can set up a default autoresponder to be sent after every completed order. All customers can be added to one autoresponder, or you can set up different autoresponders for each product they can buy. This allows you to automatically follow up on orders for specific items and generate repeat sales.
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Export Orders

Professional Cart Solutions gives you the ability to export your orders for use in other systems, such as for custom shipping labels, inventory tracking, bookkeeping, etc.
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Track Inventory

Professional Cart Solutions also allows you to sell items where you have a limited inventory. You can make sure that customers are unable to order an item that has already been purchased or is out of stock. This feature can be used for physical inventory, or for classes and seminars where you want to limit the number of participants.
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Third-Party Notification/Fulfillment

Professional Cart Solutions allows you to notify your fulfillment provider or virtual assistant of new orders in two different ways. This enables you to use a third party to pack and ship items or send out class materials. The first method is to set up a secondary order notice address, so that someone else receives a copy of the notification every time an order is made. With the Basic or Pro package, you can also use product-specific autoresponders and provide an alternate address. The autoresponder will be triggered by each purchase of a product or class, and be sent to any email address you provide. You can can customize the content of the autoresponder to contain the contact information of the customer who placed the order.
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Payment Options

Sell Products in Any Currency

Professional Cart Solutions supports the use of any currency in the world to price your products.
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Multiple Payment Options

Professional Cart Solutions accepts payment in any of the following ways:

• Credit Cards - Most users have a credit card merchant account that uses a payment gateway to authorize and accept credit cards in real time. If you don’t yet have a merchant account that supports an online payment gateway, you can get a Practice Pay Solutions account from us here. You can also use our system to process credit cards offline. The shopping cart will collect the payment information entered by the user, then you sign on to our secure server to obtain the information for later processing. Here are the credit cards our system supports (if your merchant account also accepts them):

  Visa MasterCard American Express Discover/Novus

  BankCard (Australia) Delta Diner's Club Maestro Solo (UK)

• Electronic Checks - Our system will collect payment information for customers who wish to pay by echeck. Then you sign on to our secure server and obtain the information to process checks with your Practice Pay Solutions Virtual Terminal or check printing software. If you don’t yet have the ability to accept echecks, you can apply for an account here.
• PayPal - Our system supports the use of PayPal as your only method of payment or an alternative to offer customers in addition to accepting credit cards and/or echecks.

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Automated Recurring Billing

Professional Cart Solutions offers an automatic recurring billing feature that allows you to have customers pay at any interval you choose for subscriptions, memberships, payment plans, or ongoing classes and professional services. Both you and the customer receive a receipt when each payment is processed, so this feature can completely eliminate the need for regular invoicing.
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Affiliate Program Management

Register Affiliates

The Professional Cart Solutions Pro package offers a fully-featured affiliate program management system. We provide a form customized with your look and feel for affiliates to register on your web site. You can customize this form to include your commission pay structure, terms of service, etc.
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Custom Welcome Page

When your affiliates sign up, they can be directed to a custom welcome page where you can explain more about how your affiliate program works.
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Autoresponse upon Joining

Our system will automatically send your affiliates a welcome message with instructions about how to use their affiliate links to make referrals to your site, plus the affiliate’s username, password, and how they can log in to their affiliate account. You can use an autoresponder to train your affiliates about your products or encourage them to refer news of new products and services or special offers.
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Track Affiliate Sales

When affiliates refer customers to your site using their affiliate link and those customers make a purchase through your shopping cart, the affiliate is credited with the sale. You can see which affiliate made the referral in your order records and notification email, and the affiliate receives a notification email also.
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Commission Payout Reports

Our system will provide you with commission payout reports on any schedule you like, telling you exactly how much commission each affiliate is due. You can also export this information for use in a spreadsheet or bookkeeping system.
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Custom Commission Levels

Our system allows you to set a default commission level for all affiliates. You can also set higher or lower rates for individual affiliates, or for particular products. Product-specific commissions can be set as a percentage of the total, a flat amount, or you can exclude some products from paying commissions at all.
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Two-Tier Pay Structure

You can offer your affiliates a second-level commission. If an affiliate refers someone else who  decides to become an affiliate, you can pay the first affiliate a residual commission on the second affiliate’s referrals. If you choose this option, our system automatically tracks who should receive first-level and second-level commissions for every purchase.
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Multiple/Custom Landing Pages

You can designate any page on your site for affiliate referrals to come to, or you can set up multiple affiliate campaigns for affiliates to choose from, each one directed to a different landing page. Our system will provide a unique affiliate link for every affiliate pointing them to whatever landing page you and they choose.
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Affiliate Cookies

When a customer clicks on an affiliate’s referral link, our system places a cookie on the customer’s computer. Whenever that customer makes a purchase from you through our shopping cart, the customer’s order is marked as a referral from that affiliate. Our system gives your affiliates commissions on the customers they refer for the life of that customer, or until the cookie file is deleted or overwritten by another affiliate link.
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Affiliate Account/Order Records

Our system provides detailed account and order records for each affiliate, including the affiliate’s  contact information, order history, and first- and second-level commissions earned. An affiliate’s order history can also be exported.
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Affiliate Login Center

Affiliates are automatically assigned a unique username and password. They can log in to your affiliate center at any time to view reports of all their orders and commissions, obtain referral links, or get banners and text ads for their referrals. You can provide many different banners or ads to your affilates, each one associated with its own landing page.
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Refer-a-Friend Form

Our system provides affiliates with a special Refer-a-Friend form, which they can use to send emails referring others to your site. These emails include the affiliate’s referral link automatically.
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AssocTrac Integration

If you use the AssocTrac affiliate program management system, Professional Cart Solutions allows you to integrate purchases made through our shopping cart with your AssocTrac system.
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Ads, Coupons and Special Offers

Coupon Discounts/Special Offers

With the Professional Cart Solutions Pro package, you can offer online coupons that are deducted by the shopping cart automatically. Using our Ad Tracker feature, you create a special link for customers to click on. This places a cookie on the customer’s computer which remains active until they delete it or until your offer’s end date, if any. You can specify discounts as a percentage or a flat amount, and limit them to a certain number of customers.
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Ad Tracking

The Professional Cart Solutions Ad Tracker, available with the Pro package, allows you to track how many people have clicked on a particular online or email ad, and how many of those click-throughs turned into sales. You can also apply a coupon discount for everyone who clicks through. The Ad Tracker allows you to set up multiple campaigns to track many different  ads simultaneously. If you use the Ad Tracker to determine the effectiveness of your advertising, you can accurately evaluate multiple per-per-click or banner ad campaigns. Your Ad Tracker links can point to any page on your site you choose.
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One-Click Buy

Professional Cart Solutions offers you a one-click buy feature so you can allow customers to bypass viewing the contents of their shopping cart and go directly to your order form. You can choose to use one-click buy for only certain items or all your items. For example, if you are using our shopping cart on multiple web sites, this allows you to offer only one product at a time, separate from the rest of your catalog.
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Instant Upsells

Professional Cart Solutions offers three ways to upsell your customers at the time of purchase. You can specify any page on your site as the destination where a customer is sent after they click “Continue Shopping.” This allows you to offer a second product related to the one they just chose. When you use the Quick Add to Cart feature, whenever a customer clicks on a “Buy Me” link, the product is added to their cart and the system returns them to your designated page automatically, without the need for them to choose “Continue Shopping.” With the Bundle Offers feature, you can provide one “Buy Me” link that adds two or more products to the customer’s shopping cart automatically. This allows you to offer special deals for purchasing multiple products together, or suggest a second product to purchase after the customer selects the first one. 
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Custom Thank-You Pages

Professional Cart Solutions allows you to designate custom thank-you pages for any product. With these pages, you can thank customers for their purchase, give them instructions for how to access a class or info-product, ask them to whitelist your address in order to receive future announcements, etc.
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