ShopSite Merchant Newsletter
Vol. 5 - Issue 1, Q1, 2004
- ShopSite 7 Released
- Merchant Tip
- The "Support Queue"
- ShopSite In The News
- Industry Articles
- Knowledgebase Articles
- Current Product Information
ShopSite Releases Version 7
Version 7 of ShopSite has been released. V7 includes a number of merchant requested additions such as the following ShopSite Pro features:
- Customer Registration - Shoppers can now register at the merchant's store and save their payment and shipping address preferences as well as previous orders. Once signed in the shopper can quickly click a radio button indicating address and payment information. Checking out was never easier.
Customer Registration can also automatically assign a coupon to any shopper in a merchant-specified Registration Group. Now you can easily give discounts to your frequent shoppers or to your wholesalers or resellers.
- Mini Cart - A Mini Cart summarizing current shopping cart totals can now be displayed on store pages.
- Shopping Cart Templates - Designers and merchants can further customize the shopping cart and registration screens. ShopSite's powerful custom template feature previously available for pages and products is now available for the shopping cart screens.
- Pagination - Assign many products to one page and ShopSite will automatically create additional pages so that only the merchant-specified maximum number of products are assigned to each page.
- Variable Pricing - A product can be assigned a variable price. This allows the shopper to input the desired price for donations or auction payments.
- JavaScript Variables - JavaScript Cart Variables are now available on the checkout screens. This is useful for integrating with 3rd-party affiliate tracking or statistic programs.
The following features are in both ShopSite Manager and ShopSite Pro:
- Copy Pages and Products - Now you can use an existing product or page to create a new one.
- HTML E-Mail Shopper Receipts - Merchants can configure ShopSite to send e-mail receipts in HTML format.
- Order Confirmation Screen - ShopSite can be configured to generate a Confirmation Screen after the Shipping/Payment screen and before the Thank You Screen is displayed.
- Free Shipping - Merchants can set up Free Shipping to certain states and/or countries if an optional minimum purchase amount is met.
- Require Certain Checkout Fields - Shoppers can be required to fill in certain fields such as Company or Phone Number.
- Page Preview - Previously a ShopSite Pro only feature, pages can now be previewed in ShopSite Manager before publishing.
The following features are in both ShopSite Starter, ShopSite Manager and ShopSite Pro:
- Remove Button - Beside each product in the cart the merchant can indicate to have a "Remove" button.
- Improved PayPal Integration - ShopSite now uses PayPal's IPN (Instant Payment Notification) to track when a purchase is actually paid for. ShopSite will only add a PayPal order when notified of payment from PayPal.
- Paymentech Orbital Gateway - A new payment gateway has been added - Paymentech's Orbital Gateway.
- Print Pagination When Viewing Orders - When a merchant prints multiple orders while viewing them in the back office, the orders will print one per page.
- New Themes - Rounded and Side bar themes have been added.
Merchant Tip
"How do you synchronize inventory between web, phone and mail orders? For example, if I use QuickBooks (or any other order management system that imports ShopSite orders) how do I keep an accurate Quantity on Hand?"
Solution
Use your store website to input any phone or mail orders -- just bring up your own store, add the products to the cart, and fill out / submit the order through the shopping cart. The Quantity on Hand values will be updated in ShopSite as well as in your order management system (when you download them) -- right along with your regular web orders. As a side benefit this will also help the employee taking the order to remember to ask for all the necessary information (such as CVV2) as the shopping cart fields are being filled in.
-Andrew
The "Support Queue"
Q: Recently some shoppers using Microsoft Internet Explorer report sometimes getting "The page cannot be displayed" error or "You must specify a valid value for: storeid" error in the cart pages. Is this related to the latest Microsoft IE security patch?
A: Yes, it does appear that an old IE problem has resurfaced with the latest security patches. This issue occurs with certain versions of the apache/modSSL web server. Having your web server Admin or Hosting Provider add a directive similar to this:
SetEnvIf User-Agent ".*MSIE.*" nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown
in the SSL section of your apache-SSL configuration and restarting the web server has proven to keep this error from happening. Go to Microsoft's Knowledgebase Article 831167 for instructions from Microsoft on this issue or read our ShopSite Knowledgebase article on this.
ShopSite In The News
New Features for Hosting Software Vet
"Version 7.0 of the ShopSite software, released on December 15, 2003, adds a swath of new features, but the basic goal remains serving all customers." Read the full ISP-Planet article here:
http://www.isp-planet.com/equipment/2004/shopsite.html.
Industry Articles
Everything You Do Affects Who Finds You
http://ecommerce.internet.com/how/customers/article/0,,10363_3322921,00.html
"lots of whiz-bang effects we're used to seeing are also an impediment to getting indexed by search engines. Crawlers aren't good at recognizing Javascript-based pages, frames, dynamic URLs, and URLs with too many parameters."
A View From A Shopping Cart
http://ecommerce.internet.com/news/insights/ectips/article/0,,10380_3294231,00.html
"here are some valuable components that make for a good shopping cart."
------------------------------------------------------------Advertisement--------------------------------------------------------
An exclusive offer to ShopSite merchants! A $47 VALUE FREE FOR 90 DAYS! Submitnet and ShopSite have joined together to offer search engine submission and URL optimization tools FREE for 90 days. Click here to start your FREE program today!"
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Knowledgebase Articles
The following article was recently added to the support knowledgebase.
S5487: Version 7.0.3 Maintenance Release
http://support.shopsite.com/kbase/view_answer.php?questionID=S5487
Current Product Information
Most recent release of ShopSite:
- 7.0.3 (On Linux, Solaris/SPARC, Windows 2000 and 2003, Irix, FreeBSD or BSDI servers)
To upgrade your store to ShopSite 7 contact your authorized reseller partner. You can find contact information for all our partners here.
Subscribe Today!
Looking for tips and information on using ShopSite features? How about relevant news from the world of e-commerce? Read and subscribe to the ShopSite Merchant newsletter to keep up-to-date on your favorite store-building program!
