Updates

Meta Tags
The new section "Meta tags" of the control panel allows you to manage html meta tags TITLE, DESCRIPTION and KEYWORDS for almost each and every page of your E-Shop, including product details pages and category pages. The terms listed in the keywords meta tag of products will also be matched against the keyword typed in the E-Shop search box.
The Meta Tags management can be disabled in the "Functional modules" section of the control panel.


New Products and Orders user interface
Both sections "Products" and "Orders" of the control panel were improved with new sort and search tools. Also, text links were replaced by icons to make the page more compact and nice, but original texts are still available as tooltips by placing the mouse over each icon.


Advanced order processing
The "Orders" section now provides two new links "Manage order" and "Documents".
The "Manage order" link leads to a powerful tool to manage the order processing, that allows to virtually place each ordered product or even a single component of a product into one of the boxes to be shipped. The per-box organization of products will then allow to completelly automate the generation of labels for each and every box and of the Packing Slip.
Also, in the same page you can generate orders to suppliers so you will receive the ordered product(s) from your suppliers or even orders to special "dropshipper" suppliers to have products shipped from the supplier directly to the buyer, where suche suppliers are marked as a Dropshipper in the supplier list.
The "Documents" link allows to actually create, view, print and email all the documents related to an order: invoice, packing slip, labels, orders to standard suppliers, orders to dropshipper suppliers.
In the "Details" link a new section was added that allows to mark an order as shipped while setting the shipment date, the courier in charge for delivery and the shipping code that may be used by the buyer to track his package. All of these information can be sent to the buyer via email with one click, plus he/she can check them online, in the order history section of his/her reserver area.


Multiple component products
In the "Products" section of the control panel a new "Product components" link was added that allows to specify the single components (if more than one) that make up the whole product. This allows to virtually place different components in different boxes during order processing in the "Manage order" page.
This functionality can be disabled in the "Functional modules" section of the control panel.


Suppliers
A new "Suppliers" section was added in the control panel to list suppliers and to define which of them provide a Dropshipping service.
In the "Products" section of the control panel one or more suppliers can be associated to each product, and one of them can be set as the default one. This will make things easy and system-driven later, when it's time to generate orders to suppliers for each product during order processing.
New settings regarding suppliers were added to the data import function so you can now import products from a certain supplier and remove associations between products and that supplier if it's missing in the supplier's import file, or remove completelly the product from the E-Shop if no supplier remains that provides that product so you don't risk to sell a product that you cannot provide any more.
Support for suppliers can be disabled in the "Functional modules" section of the control panel.


Couriers and shipping tracking
In the "Shipping costs" section of the control panel a new "Couriers" subsection was added were you can create a list of the couriers you use to ship your products. Each Courier can provide all or only some of the shipping types.
For each Courier you can also enter a Tracking URL, that is the URL of the web page where the status of each shipment can be checked online, if such a service is provided by the courier. While defining this URL you can also place the string "$TRACKING_CODE" in the part of the url where the tracking code is usually positioned, so each customer will be provided with a personalized link to the tracking page of HIS/HER shipment.


Packing Slip, labels for boxes and orders to suppliers
Now it's also possible to list and search Packing Slips in the "Documents" section of the control panel. Like for invoices a settings subsection was added for Packing Slips numbering and logo too. Similar settings pages were added for box lables, orders to standard suppliers and orders to dropshipper suppliers as well.


Image import automation
In the "Batch Operations" > "Import data", beside the new settings regarding suppliers (see above "Suppliers") new options were added regarding images. Now the import file can contain URLs of product images in a certain column; if that column is associated to the "Image URL" field the import procedure will attempt to download, resize and import product images from those URLs automatically.
In place of complete URLs the import file can contain the image filenames only; in this case the import procedure will attempt to download such files from the same dir where the import file is located (only in case the import file is located at a http or ftp url), or a subfolder if it's specified.


IWSMILE paypment gateway
The IWSMILE payment gateway (www.iwsmile.it) is now available beside the payment methods already available (see "Payment methods and plans" section of the control panel)


General improvements and bug fixes

 

Invoices
A new Invoices module was added that allows to issue and manage invoices directly in the control panel; in the "Documents" sections the E-Shop administrators can list existing invoices, send them via email to clients, issue new invoices and configure the relevant settings.
In the order list too ("Orders" section of the control panel) Administrators can view / issue invoices associated to each order by the link in the new "Invoice" column.
Customers can view/retreive their invoices by the "Documents" link in their private area on the E-Shop.
Inovices can be issued either from scratch either basing on existing orders and can be related either to products and services recorded in the E-Shop database either to freely typed descriptions of products or services.
In order to use this module, the E-Shop Administrators will have to:
- switch on the "Documents" checkbox in the "Functional Modules" section of the control panel
- define the basic settings needed for the invoice system to work properly in the "Documents" > "Invoice settings" section of the control panel; such settings are:
* Start number for each invoice set (infinite set's available)
Beside normal numbering (i.e. 1,2,3,...) a virtually unlimited list of numbering sets made of numbers and suffixes (i.e. 1a, 2a, .... 1b, 2b, ...) can be created to allow separate invoicing for different cases/products/clients/etc..
* Default language for invoices
* Logo image to be placed in the invoice document.
If no logo is uploaded the image loaded as the logo in the general layout settings will be used instead.


Data Feeds
Due to the numerous requests to export product data to price comparison portals or in general to web sites that advertise third party products a new "Data Feed" section was added to the control panel that allows to create a data export of all products or part of them (see the relation with "Groups") in .csv text format in a totally customizable way so that requirements of as many portals as possible can be met.
Beside creating your own data feed from scratch there are also several ready to use data feeds for the following portals: Trovaprezzi, Kelkoo,Tiscali, Pangora, Okprezzi, Informaprezzi.
Each Data feed is available at a certain web address (URL) displayed in the data feed details page itself. It's worth to mention that while setting a data feed you can also select one of the tracking codes previously created in the "Traffic tracking" section of the control panel so that accurate statistics about the related advertising campain can be later be found there.


Data import scheduling and other improvements
Now a data import profile ("Batch operations" > "Data import") can also be scheduled and be executed monthly, weekly, daily or even more often, in case it retrieves data from an external FTP or HTTP source.
The currency can be also specified for price fields so prices can be automatically converted to the default currency set for the E-Shop, in case it's different from the one used in the imported data file.


Shipping address Information
A new section was added to the details page of each user available by clicking on the "Modify" link in the "Users" section of the control panel; this new section contains information about the address to which to ship goods for that client. Each user can insert or update this information while placing an order or in his personal area on the E-Shop.


Geographical discount conditions
The new check box named "for certain shipping destination country/region" was created in the "Discount and surcharges" section of the control panel
This check box allows to consider destination too as a condition to apply the discount/surcharge rule; by enabling it a link "certain shipping destination country/region" will appear below that allows to select the geographical zones the rule applies to.


Loading/unloading products to/from Stock
A new tool is now available in the "Stock" section of the control panel.
By typing the product code or by searching it through the search icon and by eventually setting a specific quantity Administrators can load and unload products in stock, even more than one at a time.
At the end of this procedure a printable list of all the performed operations can be displayed.
The interface was designed to be very fast and to require as few clicks as possible to carry out tasks so that it can be used for real world check out operations in a phisical shop as well.


Extra order information and order updates
In the details page available for each order in the control panel administrators can now add some extra information in the new "Extra Info" field.
This information will be shown to the customer through the order history page available in his private area on the E-Shop.
This mechanism can be used by who processes orders in order to update customers about their order procesing stages, to provide the shipping code assigned by the courier to shipped packages, etc.


Orders: Notes
A Notes field was added in the order form. If enabled by the E-Shop Administrator it will allow buyers to enter additional information regarding their order.
This information is then displayed in the order details screen in the "Orders" section of the control panel and it's also included in both order notifications sent to the buyer and the seller thanks to the new {CUSTOM_INFO} variable available in both email templates, see the "Emails Templates" section of the control panel.


Search Engine: XML Site Map
In order to improve search engine positioning of the E-Shop pages a dynamic XML Site Map was created that will be kept continuosly up to date.


Pricing display for registered users only
In the "General Settings" section of the control panel a new field named "Login mandatory to publish prices on products" was added that allows to display product pricing to registered users only, after they login.


Coming soon products page
A new "Next arrivals" page was added in the E-Shop front end.
This page will display products whose in stock quantity is zero, but for which more pieces are on arrival.
A link to this page will appear on the E-Shop front end only if at least one product exists that matches the conditions above.


Automatic availability of products on arrival
The new field "Automatically make available on arrival products on arrival date" available in the "Availability management" section of the control panel allows to automatically move the products on arrival to the available products on order arrival date.
This setting can also be customized product by product as needed.


Order processing timing
The field named "Date of shipment (even if the product is available), dd. working from:" was added in the "Data" page of each product too, only for physical products. This way administrators can define specific order processing timings product by product, basing on the time necessary to prepare each of them to be shipped.
If a product doesn't require a different shipping timing than most of others then you can just leave its default setting untouched since it refers to the already existing general setting in the "Availability management" section of the control panel.
This function is useful in case of products that require a special treatment before shipment, for example big packages, products that require to be assembled or to be customized first.


Ability to order a product based on packaging type
In the packaging settings ("Layout settings" > "Advanced layout settings" > "Units of measurement and packaging") administrators can now set things so that products can be ordered only by selecting certain packaging types or certain units of measurement. That is now a product can be ordered, for example, by "boxes" only even if the base packaging is single "pieces".
This setting can also be customized by each category in the "Categories" section of the control panel.


Automatic currency exchange
From this release on it will be no more necessary to manually update currency exchange rates, this task is now automatically executed by the system every few minutes.
WARNING ! The exchange rates set will be REPLACED with the current ones when the E-Shop is upgraded to this release.


ISO currency codes
The list of currencies has been adapted to the International ISO standards.


New user interface for "volume" multiple values features
For those products that have lots of values (more than 300) for their multiple value or choice based features, values will automatically be made searchable alphabetically or by keyword. This interface allows faster page loading beside providing an elegant and quick management method even for huge amounts of data.


Multi variant products list
In product lists the logic applied to display multi-variant products was modified. Where the default variant of a product is not marked as published the next published variant is displayed instead.


Miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes
Statistics, web services and many other aspects and function were adjusted and improved and many bugs were spotted and fixed.

 

Client's credit
Users can now be assigned a credit they can spend by placing orders on the E-Shop, optionally within a certain date and having a maximum percentage of each order amount to be paid by the available credit.

Related products
Now you can create a relation between a produt and other products of the catalog and propose the related product when the buyer is looking at the product page or is ordering that product. You can also set a special discount for related products in case they are offered during the order procedure.

Testimonials
Registered users can now insert their testimonials, moderated by administrators.

Product reviews
Registered users can now insert their review about a product, moderated by administrators.

Buyer provided product specifications
Added the ability for admins to setup additional input fields for each product so buyers can/must provide additional information about how the product should be

VAT management for international sales
VAT is now applied or not depending on the seller's and buyer's country

Discount/surcharge for certain countries or regions
A new condition was added to the ones available for discount/surcharge rules that allows to apply the rule only to certain countries or regions

Import procedure improvements
The data file can now be downloaded from external sources via FTP and HTTP. A scheduler is available to perform such downloads/imports automatically.
The ability to append a leading and a trailing text before and after the imported values for one or more columns was added.
VAT inclusive prices can now be imported correctly.

Improved security
A verification field (graphic password) was added to frontend forms to prevent undesired automation of submissions by external software.

Order history page
The total orders amount was added.
The new filter by orders status now allows to limit the orders list by status (all/pending/processed/cancelled)

Additional Administrators can manage part of the product catalog
Further control over Administrators access levels: restrict administrator to see, edit and delete only products created by him, optionally having a limit on the number of products he can create.

Regions
Limit orders by regions (extending order allowance thresolds based on the product quantity from per country granularity to per region granularity)

Zone/Country/region condition support in discount rules
Zone/Country/region of the client can now trigger discount/surcharge rules

Numerous improvements and bug fixes