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ProductCart v4.7 preview: see what’s new in our shopping cart software

Written by NetSource Commerce

Updates

We’ve been working on ProductCart v4.7 for quite some time. We thought we’d be able to release it a couple of months ago, but then – as it often happens in software development – we decided to work on it a bit and take care of some more “to do’s”.

Well, it’s almost time to release now. Only a few more weeks of testing, and we’ll be ready to go. In the meantime, wanted to give you a sense of what’s coming.

New Features

Pinterest integration

You can now turn on the Pinterets “Pin It” button from the Store Settings area of the ProductCart Control Panel. The button is automatically added to category and search result pages…
pinterest storefront category
… and to the product details page.
pinterest storefront

From the Control Panel, you can specify whether to display the “pin counter”.

pinterest admin

Updated PayPal Integrations

We’ve worked with our partners at PayPal to bring you the very latest PayPal payment technology. One of the recent changes is the introduction of “PayPal Advanced”, where customers don’t leave your store during checkout when paying with a credit card, and yet payments are made “invisibly” on the PayPal Web site.

Customers have a better checkout experience, and at the same time you can reduce the scope of your PCI compliance requirements as the payments don’t actually happen on your Web store.

Customers will also be able to pay with BillMeLater (a service owned by PayPal), which basically allows you to offer financing on their purchases, through PayPal.

Here is a screen shot of how things look during checkout:
paypal advanced instore checkout

Support for Google Shopping

Last year Google switched to a pay-per-click model for their product listings. The bad news is that now you need to pay to list your products on Google shopping (what used to be Google Product Search within Google Base). The good news is that Google now makes money with those listings, so they are more visible and can get you some real traffic.

google shopping ads

Posting products to Google Shopping is not easy. There are several requirements, and those requirements change depending on the products that you are posting. ProductCart v4.7 includes a new features that allow you to prepare a product “feed” that is compatible with Google Shopping’s new requirements, and upload the feed to your Google Merchant account.

google shopping settings

For example, you can now specify the correct Google Product Category – which may be different from the name of the category that the product is assigned to in your storefront – and enter other attributes specific to apparel products (Google Shopping is particularly picky when it comes to listing shoes and clothing).

Better search results

The meta tag “keywords”, which is no longer useful for search engine optimization purposes, needed a new way to be helpful: we found it! The search feature in ProductCart will now check those keywords when querying the product database. This can help you introduce terms that customers may use to look for a product, even if those terms are not in the product name or descriptions (e.g. misspelling, names of competing products, etc.).
keywords meta tag
The super-robust product import feature in ProductCart allows you to import the Keywords meta tag, so you can easily update the product database that way. Of course, you can also edit products individually.

New gateway added: Transaction Express™ from TransFirst®

We added a new payment gateway: Transaction Express™ from TransFirst®
We also made improvements other payment gateways. For example, we added AVS code for the VirtualMerchant gateway.

Improvements

Our issue tracking system tells us that we worked on hundreds of separate items during the development of v4.7. Among them…
  • Added data entered by customers in the Custom Input Fields for the following data exports: “Export Sale Data”, “Export Order Information” and “Export Ordered Products Information”.
  • Added a variable to disallow discount codes when products in shopping cart are ‘On Sale’.
  • Added the ability for the store administrator to add the Gift Certificate recipient information to the order before resending the e-mail to the recipient.
  • Customers can now add saved products to shopping cart even if assigned to a hidden category.
  • Update the drop-shipper interface to display the status of their specific items, not the status of the entire order. So if they shipped their items it will display as shipped, even if there are other items in the order that are not shipped.
  • Add Order Code to Invoices in both the store front as well as the control panel.
  • Expanded the character limitation of the “Terms & Conditions Agreement” from 50 to 255.
  • When using tax by location and the setting “Display taxes Separately” is set to “yes” taxes were not displayed.
  • Removed the charts from the main menu due to performance issues. They are now available via the “reports” menu drop-down.
  • Removed all credit card details from the “Packing Slip”
  • Fixed the ordering of the Feedback IDs in the Help Desk feature.
  • USPS “From Zip 4” error displays when generating a label due to an USPS update.
  • USPS 2013 Name Change: USPS Parcel Post is now Standard Post.

Release date

Very likely in April. As soon as we have a date, we’ll let you know!

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