We’ve put out a new release – v12 sp2 (service pack 2).  Let’s briefly discuss some of the new features.

TLS V1.2 – You may have no idea what this means but it is an important protocol for securely communicating between programs and servers.  Earlier versions of TLS are no longer considered secure enough so the Payment Card Industry (PCI) counsel has set June of 2018* as the date that all servers and applications processing credit card data need to be using TLS v1.2.  In fact, many vendors are making the switch before that date.  With ShopSite supporting v1.2 you should not have any problems when your payment gateway, shipper or tax vendor make the switch on their servers.  Note that full support of TLS 1.2 is in release 4 of service pack 2 (i.e. v12 sp2 r4.)

New Merchant Product Search – I don’t know if the product search that the merchant uses has ever been modified, so it was due for a makeover.  While making it more powerful, we’ve also made it easier to use for sites with just a few products.  You now have a choice between the grid view that is familiar to the store setup wizard:

and between the powerful list view:

So the product search can be tweaked for a store with a small number of products or one with thousands.

Add to Cart pop-up – Another new feature is the Add to Cart Pop-up (or lightbox or Ajax JavaScript display.)  When a shopper adds a product to the cart  a message pops up showing that it was added and displaying the new cart total; outside of the pop-up the page is shaded. The shopper can either proceed to checkout or continue shopping on the same page.

This is an optional setting so if you want it to work as it always did where the shopper was taken directly to the cart you can still do so.  This option is probably better for stores where shoppers typically add more than one product to their cart.  This way they are not going to the cart with each new product and taking a little longer for each screen refresh.

More Features – There are a number of other new features.  Including:

• Automatic one-time use coupons for use in Abandoned Cart emails
• Addition of GTIN product field to Advanced Order Options for Google Feed
• Option to use a configured ShopSite shipping method to calculate shipping if no real-time rates are returned.
• New “Habit theme” works with Bootstrap CSS, JQuery, and other components and elements from the open source project

I’ll be covering some of these in more detail in future posts.

* The original PCI date to be compliant was June 2016.  It has now been pushed back to June 2018.