Ozcart V5: New features released in April, 2019

  • Monday, 29th April, 2019
  • 09:08am

We’re happy to announce a huge update to Ozcart. We’ve been working on improving Ozcart since we took over last April, 2018. This update includes new features that we have been working on since last September, 2018.

We recommend going through these changes one by one so that you can learn how to use them and for you to remember that they are there.

 

Here’s our changelog that includes a description on how to use some of the new features, bug fixes, and notable new additions:

 

Important: Since we have added many new features, you must give permission to your staff group to be able to use them. Go to Staff > Staff Groups > Edit your staff group > Either click on Select All for both Access and Modify permissions or select the relevant permissions. Save. This message will be repeated at the bottom.

 

More option pricing choices: We launched a requested feature that allows you to select between 3 ways to display your option/variant pricing. Navigate to Store Settings > General Settings > Options > Products (the first expanded tab). There, you’ll find the new “Product option/variant pricing” as the first setting. Choose to display option/variant pricing as:

1. Total price: Product price + option/variant price in one value. E.g., if product price is $10 and option/variant price is $5, it will display $15.
2. Option price only (+ or -): Option/variant price addition or subtraction without including the product price. E.g., if product price is $10 and option/variant price is $5, it will display +$5. If option/variant price is $5 less, it will display -5$.
3. Do not display: This removes option/variant pricing.

Another Option/Variant update: Enable or disable the “Display product option stock quantity” in Store Settings > General Settings > Options > Stock. This will remove or display the quantity left for Options/Variants on your website.

Custom Discount: If you want to add customer group pricing, quantity discounts, or special offers (have sales for products) for certain products, certain categories, certain brands, or a mixture of the above, you can now do so using the easy to use Custom Discount. This means that you can now have product sales or add customer group pricing for all products at once (or specific ones only). Choose between a dollar amount or percentage.
You can even set up quantity discounts (e.g., 2 or more at $11.  4 or more at $10).
Set up multiple discounts and manage them all from Custom Discount. No need to go to separate products to set up different sales or customer group pricing. Easily activate or deactivate discounts, run an offer from and to a specific date, on specific days, at a certain time, have a countdown timer show up, have a label/ribbon visible (e.g., 5% off) on the image, and change the design of the countdown timer or ribbon using CSS or the Visual Editor. Navigate to your admin area > Products > Custom Discount to try it out!
View documentation.

Custom Form: A new form builder for Ozcart. With custom form, you can create any number of forms that you want, add them nearly anywhere, and even accept PayPal payments with them. You have the ability to customize the admin email for every form, success message, and the email notifications for both store owner and the visitor. Easily view past entries/records to see past submitted messages, add CAPTCHA, add a contact form as a product tab, and much more.
View documentation.

Custom email templates: You can now edit email templates that your clients receive, such as account registration, affiliate registration, per order status such as for new pending orders, for product reviews, contact requests, and more! You can create a default template (like a fancy newsletter style in HTML) for your emails to use, and add your own logo, colours, header and footer text, and choose if you want to use that template per email template or not. To use Email Templates, navigate to Store Settings > Email Templates.

Custom Order Success Page (Thank you page): Navigate to Store Settings > Order Success Page – and enable this useful feature that lets you choose what information you want to display after a customer checks out. You can also up-sell products, add your own content, and even add auto-generated unique coupon codes for every checkout – the system will do that on its own for you.

Product Tabs: This new feature allows you to set an unlimited amount of product tabs for your products. It goes further than that, you can make it so that it only shows on certain products, certain categories, and certain brands. The best part is that it’s manageable from one place instead of separately per product. Navigate to Products > Product Tabs to access it.
Important: We have removed the older product tab system that was located in both Theme Settings > Pages > Product and when you edit a product in the admin area.
View documentation.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs): Add FAQs by navigating to Information > FAQ and to Design > Blocks > FAQ and also FAQ Category. This lets you add questions and answers and put them anywhere on your site. There is also a page where you can view all FAQs. You can add that to your menu. View documentation.

AJAX Live Search: We added an instant live search to the main search field in your website’s header area. Your visitors can now search and see results appear as they are typing. You can control if the image, price, add to cart button, and product model should appear, along with managing other settings in Design > Live Search.

Custom Text on product pages: When you edit a product, in the General tab, you can now add custom text that will appear to your customers below the stock level. HTML allowed.

Product discounts/sales can now show the percentage and monetary value of the sale. It will help your customers know how much they’re saving. You can enable or disable them in Store Settings > General Settings > Options > Products:
1. Display sale in percentage
2. Display sale in monetary value
If you want to modify their colour and style, use the Visual Editor or write some CSS code.

Product Options/Variants image switching: When you create an option/variant with an image, it will now switch to that image. For example, create a colour option/variant with the text “Red” for a bracelet, and you assign an image of a red bracelet, it will now automatically switch to that new image when you select the option/variant “Red” on your product page. To make use of this feature, when you add an option/variant, make sure to select one of the following “Types”: Select, Radio, or Checkbox.

Categories, Brands, and other sections: You can now search/filter categories, brands, and some other pages in the admin area. This will help you find information quicker.

Full Page Background & Slideshow: Navigate to Design > Blocks and activate Full Page Background Slideshow. Its straightforward setup enables you to add backgrounds to your website. These backgrounds will take the full width and will appear behind your main content. Make sure to choose large images.

Image Gallery: In Design > Blocks, you’ll find Image Gallery. You can create multiple mobile responsive galleries and display them anywhere. Clicking on an image opens an attractive popup gallery view, or you can choose to have a link open when you click on images. Lots of settings to explore in there!

Counters: Show your website’s stats with icons to your customers. Navigate to Design > Blocks > Counters to set it up.

Disqus: Add Disqus anywhere on your site. Disqus enables its users to comment directly on your site without having them register on your site. It creates more social interaction.

Reviews: Add a review block anywhere and your customer’s review will be shown in grid format. Customize it in Design > Blocks > Customer Reviews.

You can now choose a currency exchange rate provider in Store Settings > General Settings > Locale. Make sure to register with one of them to get your API key.

Not everyone wants to show the stock level. We’ve given you an option to disable that Availability text on your product page. Navigate to Store Settings > General Settings > Options > Stock and choose the option you want for “Display stock availability text”.

You can now print a brands list for any order, in PDF format. It will display a list of brands and purchased products for those brands that you can use for your suppliers or other business reasons.

Add Tracking Numbers To Orders: This feature was already available but it wasn’t working as intended. It now does.
Add a tracking number to your orders with a predefined message and notify clients immediately. When you view an order, you can select the carrier and add a tracking number, which will automatically generate the text in the comment section that includes the link to that carrier’s tracking page along with the tracking number. This can be edited in Design > Blocks > Add Tracking Numbers To Orders, and there you can add other carriers and modify the template comment message.
View documentation.

Canned Messages: Access this in Orders > Canned Messages and create predefined messages to instantly add them to orders when updating your clients about their order or order status. You can also use this for internal notes. This saves you time when you have to repeat the same message. It works similarly to Add Tracking Numbers To Orders. Make sure to click the Notify Customer button if you want this message to be sent to your customer.

Timezone: You can now change your timezone. We highly recommend checking to see if the correct timezone has been set. Navigate to Design > Blocks > Timezone Sync and verify it there.

Important: We moved Custom CSS and Custom JavaScript that are in Design > Theme Settings > Customization to Design > Blocks > ‘Custom CSS – JavaScript – Code’. We strongly recommend not deactivating ‘Custom CSS – JavaScript – Code’ or, if you have any code, you will lose your code. This new extension gives you the ability to enable/disable your code for testing (without losing it), and adds a new section called “Custom Code”. Its description is in there.
If you had any code in Customization, we have moved it for you to the new location.

 

Small but useful changes:
1. Price rounding and calculation for products (product pricing, option/variant pricing, quantity discount pricing, and special pricing) has been re-written and now calculates properly. As such, we have had to remove some editable fields from the product quick edit. We added price + tax as a column. We recommend reviewing your product prices and their promotional pricing.

2. When searching in the Image Manager (the one that allows you to upload and add images to your website), it will now display search results of files found in all folders and subfolders. Also, it is now case insensitive, allowing you to find all results (without worrying about uppercase and lowercase).

3. Added product IDs to Products > View Products in the admin area. This lets you see the ID of a product. This also means that if you sort by ID (click on the ID title in the column), you can now see which is the most recent/oldest created product.

4. When you edit Products, Orders, and Categories, you’ll now see the item you’re editing next to the “Edit” text.

5. Enable or disable categories quickly by clicking on the “Enabled” or “Disabled” button. This also lets you see which category is enabled/disabled from the list rather than having to edit each one.

6. On the frontend, on category pages, if you have subcategories, you previously would only see the subcategory name (under Refine Search) without an image. If your subcategory has an image, the image will now be displayed.

7. You can expand box lists like the one in Staff Groups and in Products > Specifics. This enables you to see all the options in a text box. Additionally, the staff groups permissions are now in multiple columns rather than in only one column.

8. Design > Blocks: Enable and Disable texts are now visible to help you determine the status of a Block/Extension. This holds true for other lists as well, such as Analytics, Payment/Shipping plugins, and so on.

9. Customer Group descriptions now show up during registration.

10. In the admin area, in any text editor, clicking on an image allows you to edit its attributes by adding a Title, Alt text, and a link. Click on an image and look for the pen icon. Helpful for SEO and accessibility.

11. “Show in stock only” filter has been added on frontend category, search, brand, and specials pages. It appears next to the product layout changer buttons.

12. Square has been updated to the latest API version. With Square, you can accept online payments and use their POS to manage your inventory both in your brick and mortar and online stores.

13. Added CSS classes to the My Account page (the page your clients access to view their account) for nearly all elements. This enables you to use a CSS code like “display: none;” to hide My Account menu items that you don’t need in your shop. You can also use these CSS classes to add colour and change the style of the My Account page. Added CSS classes to the product detail page for tags, model, availability/stock, and reward points.

14. The text editor has been vastly improved since September, 2018.

15. New quick edit icon that you can activate/deactivate to show that icon on top of the title of products (in the frontend area). It lets you, as an admin (and only admins who are logged in to the admin area), click it to take you to the admin area’s product edit page for that product. This does not show up to your clients.

16. Your Geocode/address can now be entered in Store Settings / General Settings > Store > Geocode / Address. This will show a View Maps button on your contact page.

17. Page List Side Menu – Find it in Design > Blocks. You can select the pages you want displayed in that block. Then, use the Layouts Builder (Design > Theme Settings) to place that block preferably in the column left or right sidebars of the Information layout (you can also add it in other layouts, but this would let your visitors browse information pages quicker, like this: https://demo.ozcart.com/_v5/delivery). You can create multiple blocks of this and place them in different layouts for different purposes.

18. Coupon update: you can now set up coupons for certain customer groups only. A filter will also be added to the coupon page shortly.

19. The admin Categories page now shows the category ID in a column.

20. Telephone number is now optional. You can remove your text from General Settings > Store > Phone. When the field is empty, your phone number will also no longer show on invoices and dispatch notes (shipping lists).

21. You can now upload PDFs using the file/image uploader. After you add a PDF, you can right click it in the file/image uploader and copy its link to use it in your text editor (by pasting the link and letting visitors click on that link to download the file).

23. When you view an Order, you can now delete Order History entries when there is more than one entry. It will also delete them for the customer in his account.

24. The admin area left menu has been modified a bit and will be further improved shortly.

25. The admin area’s design has been modified and will be further improved shortly.

26. Some admin area options have been renamed for clarification.

27. ‘View documentation’ links have been added to many different pages in the Ozcart admin area. Clicking on any of those takes you to that relevant knowledge base article.

28. The following is available on demand, for the moment, as it’s a complex system. Fastway shipping now delivers accurate shipping prices. We added suburb to Australian addresses to fix that issue. When you have a client based in Australia, he will get a suburb field and has to fill it up. This field appears once he enters a valid postal code. Submit a ticket about this if you need us to add this feature to your store.

 

Among the many bug fixes, these are notable:
– Blog posts SEO URLs are now functional.
– Categories SEO URLs for the Blog are now functional.
– Adding a slideshow in the Slideshow section in the Layouts Builder will now make the slider full width (edge to edge of your screen) and will now work in mobile mode as well.
– Design > Blocks > Products by Category: could not save data. Now, it saves properly.
– e-Path payment gateway now redirects to your URL.
– Gift Certificate emails and Affiliate approval emails had a broken logo image. Logo now shows up.
– ANZ eGate bug fixes. It now works as intended.
– Fixed invoice logo. It now shows up.
– Text editor fix: Firefox users can now see the pop-up that appears when you click on an image, allowing you to change image size, add attributes, align image, remove image.
– Images are now responsive in the body and footer of websites.
– Product popup viewer fix for “image not found” error.
– Quantity Discounts and Specials (in the Promotions tab when editing a product) have been improved. Calendars now load the first time before saving, prices are calculated properly before saving. Layout has been improved as well.
– Options/Variants bug fixes for calendars and price updates.

 

Important: Since we have added many new features, you must give permission to your staff group to be able to use them. Go to Staff > Staff Groups > Edit your staff group > Either click on Select All for both Access and Modify permissions or select the relevant permissions. Save.

 

We’ll keep working hard on improving Ozcart. Meanwhile, let us know in the comment section below what you’d like to see in the future versions!

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