CoreCommerce

Here are the new features released by CoreCommerce in the latest version, 8.8.90, which was completed on April 5th, 2012. Enjoy!

1. You can now configure content pages to ignore the “Force Login Before Viewing Categories/Products” setting (Checkout Settings > Checkout tab > Customer Login section). When this setting is enabled, then even if a customer is forced to login before viewing products, they will STILL be able to view content pages. Before this setting was added, content pages were also hidden until you logged in.
2. Added the ability to run credits from inside the admin panel when using the Paymentech gateway.
3. You can now import and export Custom product lists.
4. You can now configure the store to Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) the Gift Certificate emails to the  admin email account.
5. Added a new report that will show the current Reward Points Balance of each customer.
6. Added the ability to use ShipWorks fulfillment
7. When you view gift certificates in the admin you can now view 2 new columns for “Created Date” and “Expiration Date” (will say “Never” if there is no expiration date). In the admin Phone Order feature, we added a new field when you search for a customer. The new field is Customer Bill Company.
8. Added the ability for Braintree (orange) users to choose between auth and auth & capture.
9. Updated the Channel Manager Integration.
10. Added the Bing product feed export to allow a customer to export products to Bing’s product feed service.
11. Added 2 on/off switches to allow a user to exclude a product from the Bing and Google product feed exports. This way if you sell items you cannot send to Google, for example, you now have a way to exclude them from the export that CoreCommerce builds to send products to Google.
12. For a product that has Qty Based Pricing, the system used to NOT allow you to add that type of product from the product list template, since it had to calculate the Qty Based Pricing price. Now, we have added a setting that will allow the customer to add this type of product to the cart from the product list. It will use a Qty of “1” and auto give you the Qty Based Price of “1”. Qty.
13.  For the “Request a Lower Price” feature, you can now upload an image that will display on the product detail page instead of having to use text i.e. “Request a Lower Price”.
14. Altered how the category breadcrumbs work on the product detail so that it will only show 1 trail on the product page, vs. having to see all possible trails.
15. On the Admin Product and Category pages, add the ability to enter in product and category slugs that will become the “title” of the product or category page instead of it having to be the product name.
16. The Canonical URL in some situations will now auto update itself so you do not have to manually edit them all. For example, when you change your domain name, the Canonical URL inside each product can auto update itself to match, when in the past they would not.
17.  Added a new setting to choose the number of grid columns on the homepage.
18.  Altered how you edit a Coupon, so that you do not have to go through the wizard process to edit a coupon anymore. It’s a quicker way to edit a coupon.
19. Integrated with HubSpot Lead API.
20. Customers can now view a list of their previously ordered items and re-order them.

How Do I Configure Free Shipping?

1. Login to your Admin Panel
2. Settings > Shipping Settings
3. Locate the option to Enable Free Shipping and click Configure
4. Complete the options on the screen and enter the Ship Service & Ship Method near the bottom of the screen and click Save
5. **IF you want all products to be eligible for free shipping, click the button: Mark All Products Eligible**

Configure Only Specific Products are Eligible For Free Shipping

1. Login to your Admin Panel
2. Inventory > View Products
3. Locate a product you want to offer free shipping on and mouseover the product row and on the right, click Edit / Gear Icon > General Info
4. Click Shipping Info on the left and under Basic Info, locate the option Eligible for FREE Shipping and turn it ON
5. Click Save

NOTE: When customers view that product, it’s denoted that the product is eligible for FREE Shipping (assuming you have a $50 order minimum or something similar)

Using FREE Shipping as a Coupon

1. Login to your Admin Panel
2. Marketing > Add New Coupon
3. Under the Coupon Name, enter the Coupon Name / Coupon Code and click the Blue Next Arrow.
4. From the drop down of coupon types, choose the Free Shipping option and click the Blue Next Arrow.
5. Choose which countries you will offer free shipping to. (CTRL + click for multiple) and click the Blue Next Arrow.
6. Follow the screen prompts to configure any additional options you need and click the Blue FINISH Arrow.
7. The coupon code you specified can now be used by your customers.

Over the past year we have added more features faster than any other ecommerce provider. We have added over 200 features into our 8.0 version over this time. Officially we are launching 8.0 with all of those feature, plus these additional features. Thank you to all of you who participate in our surveys and in the CoreCommerce Forums, on Twitter and Facebook. A lot of our features are driven through these areas by customer feedback. You can always view a history of our releases in our blog, plus find great business tips. Here are the final features in our 8.0 release:

Multiple Shipping Address and Address Book Support – We now support multiple shipping address with an address book during checkout. You can find out more information about this feature in our knowledgebase.

Integrated with DAZzle/Endicia – You will be able to send your orders straight to DAZzle for fast USPS label printing. You can find out more information about this feature in our knowledgebase.

Calculate Free Shipping Setting – We added a new toggle to accommodate how people want to calculate free shipping. Currently, if you have free shipping enabled, the customer would only get free shipping if all products in their cart were eligible for free shipping. We added a new setting where all product do not have to be eligible for free shipping, but only eligible products will be given free shipping. You can change this setting under settings > shipping settings > click configure next to “Enable FREE Shipping”. Then at the bottom you will see this setting.

Minimum Order Amounts to Weight Based Shipping – The minimum order amount can be used to determine what the minimum sub-total is required to be eligible for a certain rate. For example, if you had two rates, one for standard and one for express. You can set the express to only be eligible if you spend at least $50.00 using this new feature. If a customer sub-total is less than $50 then only standard shipping options will display, if greater than $50 then both standard and express would display.

Export Vendor Orders – Vendors who log into their vendor admin will now be able to export orders in a CSV format.

eWay Gateway added UK and NZ support

Coming up in our next release in June will include Quickbooks Point of Sale integration, category and content pages using canonical urls, different payment methods based on sales channels and more. Thank you,

CoreCommerce Development Team

Many retailers ponder this question. In my research for hard statistics I came across this study done in 2008 by F. Curtis Barry & Company.

* Around 80% of all major businesses offer free shipping during the Fall and Holiday season.

* Most free shipping offers are tied to a minimum order.

* Success with free shipping varies widely from one company to another.

* Free shipping seems to work better with products that can be shipped at a low cost.

* Shipping costs have been going up, making it harder to justify a free shipping offer.

* Conditioning customers to expect free shipping may be a counterproductive strategy.

* 50% to 70% of customers are one-time buyers, which raises further doubts about the benefits of free shipping.

* Free Shipping can work with items which aren’t moving and you want to try to liquidate the inventory without marking it down

According to reports, 50% to 70% of most businesses’ customers are one-time buyers; they don’t shop a second time. If this is the case it is tough to cost justify losing money on your first sale to try to gain a customer.

Based on these statistics free shipping offers are quite the gamble. You really need to know if your online store attracts repeat buyers frequently. If not, it is tough to justify free shipping.

You also have to be wary of “conditioning” the customer into expecting free shipping for your site. If your customers start expecting it, you can turn them off when you don’t offer it.

Most of the free shipping offers which work the best is the buy $x amount and receive free shipping (limited typically to the continental US). This has been made popular by Amazon.com. This drives people to add a few more dollars to their cart to cross the free shipping threshold.

With CoreCommerce you can already do this using our free shipping feature. You can choose which countries and states you want to offer free shipping, then either discount the shipping or make it completely free. You can even specify the minimum amount required to spend to qualify for free shipping. This way when the customer adds an item to their cart, they will be notified if they need to spend a few dollars more to qualify for free shipping.

Hi again from your friendly CoreCommerce development team.

We have added a few new features to help your business.

Free Shipping Supports Customer Groups – This was a requested feature by several customers. You can set which customer groups (ie Wholesale,etc.) will be eligible for the eligible for free shipping feature in the shipping settings.

Widget Name Images – Again this was a highly requested feature. You can now upload specific images for the widget names. For example, if you are using the Category widget. The name in the widget itself on your store will say “Category”. You can now also upload an image to replace the name “Category” with an image of your choice. This allows for more design flexiblity. You can do this by configuring your active design, under the design drop down and then click on the fonts tab.

Product Tab Navigation – This feature was created due to popular demand. You can choose to use a tab format for your product detail pages for your description, related products, etc. You can do this by going to any product and clicking on the “Use Tab Navigation” checkbox under the description. This will allow you to have tab navigation for some products, while others can use the current layout.

Recently Viewed Widget Change – You can now change how many products are displayed and whether to show thubmnails for all of them, only the first one or none. You can do this under the Settings > Widget Settings.

Email Blacklist – You can now setup an email blacklist which will prevent customers from placing orders using certain email addresses. For example if you may not want to accept an orders from a yahoo.com email address. You can set this under Settings > Store Settings > PCI/Security Settings

Setup Fee Tax – You can specify if a setup fee is taxable or not taxable.

New Payment Gateways- SecureNet, PSIGate, Internet Secure (Direct)

Coming up in our next release will be some awesome new features. How does a sweet mobile commerce version of your store sound? We also are working on custom image button gallery for you to use and our brand new ccImagePlus feature which will allow you to edit images directly in your CoreCommerce account. Stay tuned for more exciting information in the coming weeks.

Your CoreCommerce Development Team

We just released CoreCommerce 7.5. We have added many features you have been requesting (of course we have more in the queue). We have redesigned the admin interface based on customer feedback surveys. We thank each one of you who helped participate in that process.

* Drag and Drop Design Mode – If you are using generic design or any of our free templates you will be able to drag and drop any existing widgets in your store front. You will also be able to edit any word or phrase by simply clicking on the word and editing it right on the fly. Important Note: If you already have a pre-designed template installed you must restore it to use this new functionality. There is some extra code and css which is needed to be in your templates. If you do not restore the templates, the drag and drop will not behave correctly. Remember, restore will remove any design changes you made (it won’t remove products or categories, etc).

* Phone Order System – You can now quickly place orders on the phone directly inside of your store’s administrative interface.

* Template Stylesheet Management – You can now edit your css and header/footer templates without using FTP with our new code editing with syntax highlighting. To use this feature, just click on the configure active design under the design link on the top right of the admin. Then click on templates/css.

* Custom Dashboard Layout – The old admin main menu is now a drag and drop dashboard. You can create custom Key Performance Indicators, connect with RSS feeds and more.

* Google Site Search Integration – We have integrated with Google Site Search. You will now be able to have the search widget use the power of Google Search to power your store’s searching capability. This does require a fee to Google to use this service. To access this feature, put your mouse over settings in the top right of the admin panel, click on widget settings, then click on search result logic. There you will see the option to use this feature.

* 3D-Secure Integration – With PayPal Payments Pro, we have integrated with 3D-Secure to work with Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode.

* Auto Meta Tags – Have us do some of the meta tag work for you. We will auto-populate your meta tags to help improve your search engine results. This happens when you add a product, category or content page and leave the meta tags blank.

* Free Shipping Membership Groups – You can set an entire membership group to receive free shipping.

* Custom Lists Can Now Have Meta Tags – When you create any custom lists you can now set meta tags for each list.

* Recently Viewed Widget Update – The recently viewed widget will now display the product thumbnail image.

* Featured Product Update – Specify the number of products to display in the feature product widget (previously you could only have 1 at a time in the widget).

* Gift Certificate Expiration Dates – You can setup gift certificates to have expiration dates for your store.

* Shipwire Integration – We have integrated directly into Shipwire fulfillment.

* Upload a Photo to a Customer – You can now upload a photo on the admin customer form. This is typically used for folks who require a fax of an ID to prove they are over a specific age for certain products.

Thank you,

CoreCommerce Development Team