Over the last few months we've invested a huge amount of time and energy into improvements to the IASP 5.0 engine that powers your website. Here's an outline of three of the exciting new additions that have resulted:
Advanced Shopping Cart
While the current generation of our Shopping Cart is used by many of our clients with great success, there are a number of features we've been asked for over the years that it doesn't have, and a heap of others that we've never been asked for that we know will provide valuable versatility to site owners trying to make the most out of their online business.
The Advanced Shopping Cart is a complete re-engineering of the current cart from the ground up with full configurability by site owners of all parameters and behaviour, and the ability for all stages of the checkout process to be fully customised.
Here's an outline of the new features we've added:
- Fully customisable shopping cart display and workflow - we can adjust Advanced Cart appearance and behaviour to whatever you'd like.
-
Simplified checkout - the default checkout process for
visitors is reduced from three pages to two (Checkout and Payment)
* on the default cart only; 'impulse' and multi-recipient shopping
carts still require three pages.
- Multi-currency support - enter prices in Australian Dollars (or any other currency), advertise prices to visitors in their local currency (AUD to Australians, USD to Americans, Euro to Europeans, GBP to Brits, etc.)
- An all-new fully configurable shipping system - Define shipping profiles (e.g. Parcel Post, Express Post, FedEx), and use our comprehensive rule editor to make them available only in certain circumstances (e.g. 'Free Shipping if client spends $500 on no more than 7 items', 'FedEx for items shipped to the States') - control shipping based on both source and destination of the product
- Advanced taxation handling - Comply with local requirements when shipping products to and from remote locations; create profiles and apply with rules - e.g. Apply 'Canadian (Alberta) PST' on all products shipping FROM Canada TO Alberta, Canada. Enter your prices including or excluding tax and have the system automatically display relevant taxes to the visitor depending on location.
- Automated Discounts/adjustment system - Create profiles (e.g. '2% surcharge', '10% discount') and apply via rules (e.g. Apply surcharge if Payment Type = 'Credit Card', Apply 10% Discount if customer is Member Level 1 or above and spending $150 or more).
- Full commission and referral tracking including affiliate discounts - Apply adjustment or shipping profiles depending on referring affiliate, and automatically calculate commission for referers.
- Track your costs - you can optionally record cost price on all items to keep track of your margins for online orders
- One purchase, multiple recipients - allow your users to choose on a per-item or per-unit basis where their products are to be shipped at the checkout stage, using our new Address Book system
-
One site, multiple merchant accounts - Maintain
multiple merchant facilities and control their availability via a rules
system - e.g. PayPal available everywhere, eWay merchant facility for
Australian users, StarPAY facility for UK visitors.
The following features are still in development and will be released after completion and testing:
- Related items / impulse checkout - Suggest alternate items for customers at the checkout ('Visitors who bought this also bought...' or 'You may find the following accessories useful...') using an advanced rules system -- ensuring you only suggest items that are directly relevant to the customer, thus improving conversion rates
- Automated restock notification - Maintain advanced inventory tracking with notifications at various stock trigger levels that reorder is required.
Our new Advanced Shopping cart is in the final stages of testing and QA now, and will be available to all clients in coming days. As there are a number of substantial changes required to perform the upgrade, and as many clients are perfectly happy with their current shop, upgrades to the Advanced Cart will take place on a by-request basis only.
We already have a shortlist of a number of clients who we'll get in contact with the instant it's ready, but if anything in the above list interests you, please drop us a line to discuss your options.
Please note: Integrating the Advanced Shopping Cart requires substantial modification to your existing product configuration and will require your online shop to be taken offline for several hours while the upgrade is done and tested.
Full-text search
The new full-text search system, available now, provides visitors to your site with more targeted, focused results when searching your content, while maintaining proper security and privacy of your data.
Try it out on this site now! (Enter some text into the search box at the top of the page)
Improvements include:
- Full word-level indexing with field-by-field weighting - allowing, for example, a 'Keywords' field that doesn't display to users but is weighted such that including any word in the field will ensure the page appears first in any search for that word
- Pluggable search-ranking algorithms - even the default simple ranking algorithm will provide more targeted results for 'hat stands' than for 'hat', and we can swap in different ranking systems to suit the requirements of your site.
- Customisable google-style results list with keyword highlighting - words searched for by visitors are highlighted in a content summary, and in headers - the appearance of the results can be fully customised to suit your website.
- Advanced relation handling - for administrators, search by the content of children, or parents (e.g. "Find me all orders that included Product X", or "Find me all Products sold with orders that met certain conditions", or search by other customisable relations.
For most sites the upgrade to Full-Text Search is a fairly straightforward process and requires no interruption to your site's functioning while it takes place. This feature is available now -- please raise a support ticket for an upgrade quote for your site if you're interested.
Multi-language support
Also available now is an extension to our Integrated Skinning System allowing you to publish your site in multiple languages (or, alternatively, publish altered versions of content on your mobile website or skinned partner site).
Integration of this functionality requires some backend work, but can usually be turned around within a couple of days. We've already handed this functionality to a few clients to integrate their multi-lingual content, and we'll keep you posted via these updates and on our Blog as they go live!
Coming soon
A couple of new features that have been requested by clients will be coming at no charge in the next couple of weeks:
- Automated e-mail changing for users - we'll be adding a system whereby registered users whose email addresses have changed can swap their login details over without compromising strict Spam Act compliance.
- Messenger campaign pre-scheduling - we'll be adding the ability to pre-schedule messenger campaigns in coming weeks, letting you set up your future campaigns before they go out and leaving the system to automatically transmit them at the scheduled time
- Various other Messenger improvements - we'll start trialling a new automatic bounce detection system soon, allowing users whose email addresses are no longer current to be automatically unsubscribed; also by request we'll be adding the ability to mail merge user data into subject lines (e.g. "John, here's our December Newsletter!")
As always, we're keen to hear your ideas on what you'd really like to do with your website but can't yet or don't know how to -- keep the suggestions and requests coming! We'll be launching a Wishlist function -- integrated into your Control Panel -- soon, so you can easily suggest ideas for new features you'd like to have in your system (for now, please throw in anything you've been thinking of as a comment on this article!) or if there's anything you'd like to discuss with us in a less public forum, please call us for a frank and confidential discussion on what you'd like to be able to do.
Kieran Morrissey
Chief Technical Officer
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