Service Pack 2 (sp2) for ShopSite version 14 was recently released.  It has a number of big feature additions such as PayPal Commerce Platform and more support for international character sets via UTF-8.  For this post, I’d like to talk about a small but potentially significant enhancement for merchants that receive orders outside the US and Canada.

ShopSite allows the merchant to let a shopper select their state or province either via a text box or pull-down menu.  Some payment gateways and real-time shipping methods like (USPS, FedEx, UPS, etc.) want the US state or Canandian province in a very specific format so in this case, ShopSite requires the pull-down menu to be used.  This works great for shoppers in the US and Canada but if a shopper is located in another country the merchant will need to either add all the potential provinces for that country or have a pull-down option of “none” or “not applicable” (real-time shippers are less strict for some fields in other countries).

In sp2 ShopSite allows the merchant to have ShopSite switch automatically to a text entry box when using pull-down menus and there is no state/province defined for that country.  Another improvement is that previously ShopSite would display all States and Provinces in the pull-down.  Now, ShopSite knows what states/provinces belong to what country.

To turn this feature on go to Commerce > States and Countries and select the “Use Javascript …” option.

That’s it, this feature is now active.  For new stores, ShopSite has already organized states under US and provinces under Canada.

The “=United States;US” indicates the country and 2-digit code.  All states for that country are then listed immediately below.  Likewise, here is how Canada is set up:

As mentioned above, for new stores these are already filled in for the US and Canada.  If you have upgraded you’ll need to add “=United States;US” and “=Canada;CA” in the appropriate spots.  A merchant in the UK, Europe, or other countries can do the same thing for their provinces.  It is a simple but potentially very useful feature.