The X-Cart add-on Product Questions enables shoppers to ask questions about the products in your store and get answers from the store staff. The questions and answers then appear in a separate tab on the product page.

To install the add-on, follow the guidelines from Installing Add-ons from the X-Cart App Store.

After installing the add-on has, proceed to the settings page.

There you can adjust the following settings:

Be sure to save your changes.

Product questions become available to customers as soon as the add-on is installed and enabled. By default, only registered customers can ask questions. However, if the store administrator allows the feature for guest users, any non-signed-in visitors can also ask questions.

To ask a question about a product, a visitor needs to use the "Ask a question" link on the product details page:

The Questions tab of the product details page will open, where they will need to click the "Ask question" button:

After that, a popup appears where the visitor will be able to ask their question:

If the visitor is a registered customer, the name and email fields in the popup will be pre-completed with the information from their profile, and the visitor will only have to type in their question and submit it. However, if the visitor is a non-registered customer (or a customer who is not signed in), all the fields will be blank, and the visitor will have to complete them.

The email field is optional. Nevertheless, if the user asking a question specifies their email address, they will get the answer on the email and see it published on the product page. Also, before submitting their question, a customer can make it a public or a private one. Private questions (and answers to them) are visible only to the users who asked them.

The store administrator is notified of new questions by email. Further questions also become available to them right away in the Questions section of the store Admin area (Catalog -> Questions):

In this section, the store administrator can answer the questions submitted by the users, edit them and even create new questions based on past discussions with the customers.

To answer a question, the store administrator needs to click on the question or the Reply button opposite it, type the answer in the Answer field, and click Update. The answer will be posted on the storefront's product details page and sent to the customer by email if it's available.

Any not answered questions are visible only to the people who asked them. Such questions appear with the "on moderation" mark next to them.

To get the product page loaded faster, the Questions tab lists only a few recent questions along with a link to show the entire list of them. The add-on uses the AJAX technique to update product questions without a complete page reload.

To add a new question, the store administrator must click New question in the Questions section (Catalog -> Questions), complete the product question form, and submit it by clicking Create.

The newly added question will appear in the questions list in the Admin area and the Questions tab of the product details page on the storefront.

The Product Questions add-on can be used in X-Cart Multivendor stores; for details, see Product Questions: Usage with Multivendor.

The store administrator can manage email notifications sent by the add-on in the Email Notifications section of the Admin area (Store setup -> Email notifications). For more info on the management of email notifications, see Quick Guide on Email Notifications.

By default, both customer and admin notifications are enabled. The store administrator can disable email notifications about new questions sent to the administrator, but not the notifications with the answers sent to the customers.

Related pages: