ShopSite recently released Version 12 Service Pack 1 (SP1) of its award-winning ecommerce software. The new version has a number of new features, many bug fixes, and improvements that make this a “must upgrade” version for any ShopSite store owner.

A list of all the new features may be found on the ShopSite website.

A good overview of the new template tags needed for custom templates is found in the ShopSite Cookbook.

A few key new features are:

• Abandoned cart follow-up emails and statistics

• Dimensional shipping for UPS and FedEx (a big one for accurate shipping rates)

• Product Image Zoom

• More product fields

• More responsive themes to choose from

Tips and Tricks

Included in 12 SP1 are a few undocumented features and functions that we think are important to mention…

Coupon product selection improved

With this new version, you can now more easily select products that are included/excluded for a coupon. It uses the same “two box ” solution as adding a product to pages:

(click image to enlarge)

HTML Editor updated

ShopSite has upgraded the built-in HTML editor to use the TinyMCE style editor. This is a more popular in-line html editor that is used in applications like WordPress.

Note that you can customize the editor in the backoffice of ShopSite under:

Utilities -> HTML Editor

There are also a few manual changes that can be made to enable things like “Advanced image attributes like hspace / vspace” and for table cell borders/backgrounds. This just requires a few edits to some of the JavaScript files that control the editor (contact us if you need these enabled).

Cart Abandonment pop-up considerations

With the new Cart Abandonment tracking feature in ShopSite, merchants can (optionally) now ask for the customer’s email address on the shopping cart page. This is accomplished by a pop-up box asking the customer to sign-in, register, or enter their email address (they can also close the pop-up and do nothing).

Before enabling this feature, make sure it makes sense for the flow you want customers to go through when trying to purchase from your online store. If it interrupts a seamless checkout process, you may not want to enable this feature.

The benefit to this feature is you get a better and earlier chance of capturing the customer’s email address, which makes sending them a cart abandonment follow-up email a bit more successful.

Seamless upgrade

We’ve thoroughly tested the new version, and have worked with a number of merchants on small issues to get them corrected in the latest release. It is a very stable upgrade that involves no downtime and no re-work.

We highly recommend upgrading your store to the latest version. If you’re a hosting client of ours, we have a simple ShopSite upgrade form to fill out. It’s free for any version 12.0 store owner, or anyone leasing any version of ShopSite.

Not hosted with us? Find out how easy it is to painlessly migrate your ShopSite store to take advantage of all that ShopSite has to offer, as well as our exclusive ShopSite add-ons to take your store to the next level.