Ship Intelligently Anywhere

Here at Revindex, we're working hard to get you ready for the big year-end push, which is why our new Storefront 10 release is focused on packing and shipping. Studies show that high shipping charges is probably the single most important reason that leads to cart abandonment. 

In reality, shipping is one of those great equalizers in business. Every merchant must pay about the same negotiated rates for similar volume of business. To get ahead, your business must ship more intelligently and minimize mistakes. This means your business must pack more efficiently and provide more accurate information to shipping providers.

For starters, the Storefront comes with a powerful packing rule engine that allows you to optimize how you pack, which in turn translates to lower shipping fees you charge your customers. For example, you can configure your packing rule to choose smaller boxes, pack more items per box while ensuring fragile items have ample padding. A good packing strategy is extremely important. If you can pack all the items in a single slightly larger box instead of two separate boxes, you can almost cut your shipping cost by half, which is more significant than any volume discount you can get. You can even print packing slips to reduce errors and speed up fulfillment.

Revindex Storefront 10 now includes a wide selection of shipping providers including ABF, Australia Post, Canada Post, FedEx, Shipwire, Southeastern Freight Lines, Unishippers, UPS and USPS. We have you covered whether you ship small parcels by express courier or oversized item on a pallet by freight. Configure your own custom rate or obtain real-time rates directly from shipping providers. You can even take advantage of our multi-warehousing system to ship products out from different warehouses based on customer proximity. Our extensive shipping coverage means lowers shipping prices for your customers!

Improved Usability

Data collected by custom fields are now shown on the merchant admin screen as normal form inputs instead of XML. This is a highly requested from customers and we're happy to delivery it.

If you use variant groups and have many options like sizes and colors, it's usually a tedious process to set up the initial variants to match variation groups. With Storefront 10, you can automatically generate all the necessary variants and match up with every possible variant group combination. 

If you use the color picker variant group, you can now provide a different color name from your actual color code (e.g. "Real blue" can have a color code of "#0000FF").

Another highly requested feature is the ability to delete incorrect payment entries. For example, a merchant accidentally entered a duplicate payment, you can now delete that extra payment easily.

We also made it easy to create a promotion to discount on selected products with or without a coupon. 

Performance Enhancements

We made some noticeable performance improvements especially for sites that receive high number of visits or have a very large catalog of products. For example, the Storefront 10 now ensures the cache is populated once during initial load only making the startup time faster. Furthermore, certain key areas like the Advanced URL provider and Search Indexer will now make use of cached data instead of querying from the database.

IMPORTANT SSL SECURITY ADVISORY

If you still haven't upgraded to Storefront 7.6 or 9.0, you should really plan to upgrade soon. The SSL 3 protocol used to secure HTTPS connections was recently exploited affecting almost every Web site. PCI requires all payment processors and merchants to migrate to the newer TLS protocol. This important date will have an impact for most merchants because almost every shipping, fulfillment, tax and payment providers are expected to put an end of life to SSL 3 either in 2016 or 2017. For example, UPS test environment already requires newer TLS since Jan 19, 2016 and PayPal test environment will require TLS connection by Aug 31, 2016 making it difficult to troubleshoot issues if your system isn't ready. This means if you don't upgrade, your shipping provider will suddenly stop returning shipping rates and your payment gateway will stop processing payments.

Australia Post Breaking Changes

We upgraded the Storefront to address important breaking changes in the Australia Post shipping services. Australia Post is terminating their old API endpoint by end of 2016 so please plan to upgrade as soon as possible.

PayPal Breaking Changes

PayPal announced an important security change to discontinue certain HTTP protocols in their API. The deadline is June 30, 2017. However, if you upgrade to the latest Storefront 10 now, you can cross this off your list of things to do.

Much, Much, More...

There are so many more new enhancements and fixes that we cannot possibly cover here. Check out the list of features, fixes and security enhancements below.

Test drive our Free Hosted Trial (no installation needed) or download our Free Trial software to run on your site. Check out the online demo (the user/pwd is on the Login page). Revindex Storefront is an EVOQ Preferred product, PCI compliant and Avalara certified for tax accuracy. Come visit Revindex.com and talk to us about your next project!

• Support Canada Post shipping services.
• Support FedEx LTL Freight shipping services.
• Support UPS LTL Freight shipping services.
• Support Southeastern Freight Lines shipping services.
• Updated Australia Post API new end point breaking changes.
• Updated Australia Post service code breaking changes for international shipping services.
• Packing calculation results are now shown on the sales order admin screen.
• Support printing packing slips.
• Improved usability on custom field results shown on admin screen.
• Improved advanced URL provider performance by using cache to query products and variants.
• Improved search indexing performance by using cache to query products and variants.
• Improved performance during multiple concurrent requests by using locks to synchronize cache initialization.
• Variant group can now specify an explicit color code separate from the displayed name.
• Added ability to quickly associate variants to variant groups.
• Added View Cart button to Product Detail page.
• Added Continue Shopping button to Product Detail page.
• Added InsertVoucher, UpdateVoucher, DeleteVoucher services in REST API.
• Allow deleting payment record in sales order screen.
• Flat discount sales order detail promotion rule can now apply promotion to all or selected products only.
• Ensure returnurl query parameter generator checks for ampersand sign when merging with non-friendly URL.
• Increase verbosity of debug log for real-time shipping to log more information for troubleshooting.
• Added shortcut to edit display template from Product Detail configuration page.
• Merchants can now configure accepted payment methods for PayU Business payment gateway.
• Fixed scheduler to check for orders with valid UserID before attempting to reward points.
• Fixed retry incomplete payment scheduler will attempt on unnecessary orders.
• Fixed sales order detail admin re-saves incorrect product dimensions and weight.
• Fixed communication print templates overriding template of another language during save operation.
• Fixed custom fields on sales order admin screen is hidden when checkout configuration is disabled.
• Fixed payment configuration screen unable to reach VCS payment gateway settings page to enter credentials.
• Fixed cannot create real-time shipping method if a marketplace seller already has the same shipping method created.
• Fixed cannot save shipping, fulfillment and tax provider credentials for non-zero portal ID.
• Fixed new product creates incorrect variant sales type.