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Easier Store Creation and Management
- New Seller Interface – The ShopSite seller interface has a new navigation bar, new terminology, and new graphical submit buttons. Some functions have been moved within ShopSite for easier access. If you have used a previous version of ShopSite, you may want to review the user interface map to familiarize yourself with these changes.
- ShopSite Setup Wizard – (New to ShopSite SC) The ShopSite Setup Wizard guides new sellers through initial store setup, including creating pages and products, establishing a page layout, and defining payment, shipping, and tax policies. The wizard starts automatically for new stores. After the store is up and running, the wizard can be accessed from the Utilities menu
- Basic and Advanced Interfaces – The simple Wizard interface is now available from within ShopSite for creating and modifying products and pages, even after the store has been created. Sellers can decide to use this basic interface or the traditional interface, which has more fields and options, and can switch between the interfaces at any time.
- Themes – Sellers can select a theme when creating their store with the Store Setup Wizard, and can later change themes by clicking the Layout & Color Themes button in the Preferences section of ShopSite. Themes automatically apply a standard layout and color scheme to all pages in a store. There a several distinct themes to choose from, each available in several color schemes.
- Customizable Colors – Host administrators can add colors to ShopSite's pull-down list. Manually edit the pagepalette.dat file located in the data directory.
Improved Merchandising
- On Sale option – (Pro and Manager only) Sellers can mark products as "on sale," and the new price will be displayed prominently near the original price. The sale price can be an absolute amount or a percentage off the original price. With power edit, a seller can easily put several products on sale with one change.
- Euro (dual currency support) – Catalog pages can be generated with prices in two currencies. The seller decides the conversion rate and ShopSite calculates the correct value. Note: the check-out form is still in only one currency. Go to Preferences® Store Text® General
- Improved Product Search – (Pro only) Go to Preferences® Search Settings.
- Strip HTML from product description.
- Length of product description is customizable.
- Option for the seller to choose which fields to index: Name, Product Description, More Info, SKU
- Return to Shopping button (SC only) can now be configured to go to a specific URL (e.g. the storefront), instead of the page the shopper last ordered from. Go to Commerce Setup ® Order System ® 'Return to shopping' field
Database Tools
- Download Database – (Pro and Manager only) Both product and page databases can now be downloaded to tab-delimited text files. Go to Utilities® Databases.
- Database Backup – (Pro and Manager only) Sellers can create backup copies of the products, pages, and orders databases from within ShopSite. Go to Utilities® Databases.
- Database Integrity Checking – Sellers can check the integrity of all databases if they suspect a problem. If the database has a problem, the seller has the option to replace it with a backed up database or an empty new one. Go to Utilities® Databases.
- Improved Database Upload – (Pro and Manager only) The database upload is now checkpointed, so that, if the upload times-out, it can restart where it left off. In addition, the upload is first done to a copy of the products or pages database. Until the upload completes and the integrity of the database is verified, the original products or pages database is not modified. This means that the time that the original database is locked has been minimized. Previously it was locked during the upload process, now it is only locked during the time the copying is done. Go to Products® Upload Product Info
Other Improvements
- Improved billing to our Partners. Once a month, ShopSite will send information to Open Market about what products are running, OS platform, etc. Open Market, Inc. can then determine what new stores should automatically be charged for. This avoids manually reviewing auth files and checking for duplicates or regenerated auth files.
- When pages are deleted from the ShopSite database and the store is regenerated (published), the HTML files of the deleted pages are deleted from the server.
- (SC Pro and Manager only) Support for Authorize.Net real-time credit card processing on SPARC and Linux Servers. There are plans to also support this on IRIX, NT and BSD in the future. Go to Commerce Setup ® Payment.
- (SC only) A scripted install is available for SC CSPs in the ShopSite Hosting Edition.
- (SC Pro and Manager only) Option to include or not include shipping in the tax calculation. Previously shipping was not included in any tax calculations. Go to Commerce Setup ® Sales Tax
- (SC only) Shopping Cart Improvements – The shipping options are now presented in a drop-down list, instead of radio buttons. The "Empty Cart" and "Recalculate" buttons have been moved to a better location. The buttons can now be either text or graphics.
- ShopSite TX is now available in Express, Lite and Pro versions, in addition to Manager. TX Pro does not have the SC associates, statistics, and volume discount features. It does have the Customer Search and other SC Pro features.
- The number of products or pages can now be limited for Pro and Manager stores.
- (TX only) Better install scripts - all variables are stored in one config file, there is better error checking, and the Scripted install now sets up the Transact account instead of having the Wizard do it.
- (TX only) Besides Solaris/SPARC platforms, ShopSite TX is available on Linux.
Click here to view the features included in version 3.5.
You can find links to the help pages for all versions of ShopSite and links to installation instructions on the main ShopSite help page.