Ballyhoo Commerce 1.9.17 is the latest version of our exclusive e-commerce software. This version includes a new price visibility feature, social sharing links and improvements on customer address management and system emails.
Price Visibility For Registered Customers
There are many reasons why you might want to hide the pricing of your products from the general public, a popular reason is that some suppliers do not allow retailers to display live pricing to help stop undercutting across retailer websites.
To help you have more control over your pricing we’ve developed a new price visibility feature which allows you to customise who is able to view the prices of your products.
Under the Selling Information of each product you have the ability to set whether the price of the item is visible for:
- All Users: everyone who visits your website.
- Registered Customers: only users who have registered as a customer on your website and logged in to the site.
- or No-One: the price is not visible to anyone, useful if you want to promote the product but the price is unknown.
The All Users option is set as default for all products, new and existing. You have the ability to change this setting as many times as you wish for any of the products on your e-commerce website.
Social Sharing
At Ballyhoo we work closely with a search engine expert to not only provide a fantastic SEO service for our customers but to also ensure our systems, whether e-commerce or content management, are optimised for search engines.
One method search engines use to help place your website in their rankings is to monitor your profile activity on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. This also includes other users’ activity on these networks, for example whether people are mentioning you in their posts and linking to your website.
To help encourage social sharing of your website we’ve included several social networking integrations in this version of our e-commerce system. With just one click, your customers can ‘Like’ you on Facebook, Tweet about you on Twitter, +1 you on Google+ and share your link on LinkedIn. The site will also display how many times these sharing links have been successfully used – lots of ‘likes’ and shares are great to encourage confidence in new users.
Addresses
Customer address management, from the customers perspective, has been improved significantly in this version.
Customers manage their addresses at the checkout stage where they are able to view previously submitted addresses and add new addresses. The look and feel of this section of the e-commerce system has also been updated to give customers a better shopping experience.
Remove Addresses
We’ve now provided the ability for customers to remove addresses from their account as they see fit, for example if they’ve moved home.
Along with selecting or adding new addresses, customers will also have the ability to remove any unwanted addresses at the checkout stage. The system will ask them to confirm that this is what they want to do and this function is only available if more than one address has been stored.
Separate Billing/Shipping Address Collections
Previously if an address was added to the system it was added as both a shipping and billing address, with customers having the ability to select the address to be used in either section.
Customers will now have the ability to independently manage these address collections and add addresses to either section as required.
Emails
HTML System Emails
System emails, such as order confirmations and delivery notifications have been improved – we’ve switched these to use HTML which allows us to improve the layout and enable formatting.
This is a step towards creating fully designed emails including your logo, specific layouts and other touches like styled buttons.
Order Dispatch Shipping Reference
For order delivery you might use a courier with a parcel tracking service. To easily enable your customers to track their deliveries you can now add an optional shipping reference when you mark an order as dispatched.
This reference will be included in the dispatch notification email sent to your customer and we can even customise your emails to include a link to the courier’s tracking website if you wish.
