We believe the latest version of Ballyhoo Commerce could revolutionise the way you manage orders.
Our e-commerce system is now fully integrated with Tradebox, a Sage Certified desktop application that seamlessly unites your e-commerce website with your Sage accountancy software to make e-commerce order management an automated and effortless experience.
Tradebox E-Commerce Integration
Tradebox Finance Manager is a desktop software application that seamlessly ties together your selling channels with Sage Accounts. This allows Sage to become an effective order management solution, giving you control over all the orders you receive online in one location.
Tradebox is Sage Certified meaning it has met stringent third-party software tests, complies with minimum requirements for installation and functionality and is always compatible with the latest available versions of Sage Instant and Sage 50.
A number of the most popular online marketplaces are already integrated with Tradebox, including Ebay, Amazon and Rakuten (play.com). Some of the biggest e-commerce systems on the market today are also fully integrated with Tradebox so we are proud to announce that Ballyhoo Commerce has joined the list meaning that our customers can enjoy the many benefits of Tradebox too.
Tradebox essentially pulls all of the order data from your website (including customer, order, shipping and payment information) and presents this data to Sage Accounts in a consistent and digestible format. This means the order data from all of your selling channels, e.g. if you’re selling on your own website and Amazon, can be reconciled so that you always have the clearest picture of how your business is performing and what needs to be done.
Even if you’re only selling through Ballyhoo Commerce this new addition to our system could save you valuable time by removing the need to manually import order data. It will also allow you to automatically create picking and packing lists and print out invoices, address labels and dispatch notes.
Important VAT Notice
In order to facilitate our integration with Tradebox, and thus Sage, we needed to change the way Ballyhoo Commerce manages VAT.
Now, we calculate VAT on the price of each product (rounded to 2 decimal places) then multiply that by the quantity sold. This is done for each item and then summed for the order total.
Please note that this change applies to upgrades to Ballyhoo Commerce Version 1.9.21 and above.
What else is new in Version 1.9.21?
Product Variant References
Ballyhoo Commerce now gives you the ability to add unique reference codes to each product variant. A major benefit of this is that products will be split by reference code in your product feed so that each variation shows up as a single product. So, if you share your feed with Google Merchant Centre, or any other price comparison engine, each variation will now be listed as an individual product.
The auto-complete search facility in Ballyhoo Commerce will also search these reference codes so if you’re selling a well-known product your customers will be able to find what they’re looking for more quickly than ever.
VAT Calculations
A number of changes had to be made to the system to accommodate our new Tradebox integration and one of the more major changes was the way we calculate VAT.
Previously, VAT was calculated on the whole order but it is now calculated on a per order line basis to tie in with the way Sage calculates VAT.
SEO
As with any new version of Ballyhoo Commerce we aim to include enhancements that will assist your search engine optimisation efforts.
In Version 1.9.21 we have improved the handling of renamed products, categories and content pages so that, if you change the name of a page or product, you don’t lose any of the progress you’ve made in your SEO endeavours.
We’ve also taken steps to ensure that only the most important pages on your website will be indexed by search engines.
Social Sharing Buttons
Social sharing buttons have been around for a long time now so we’re all used to seeing counters alongside them showing how many times a page has been liked, tweeted or +1’d.
There are a few reasons you might want to turn the counter part of the button off though – perhaps no-one is sharing your website and you want to hide this or perhaps the buttons have been added to your website retrospectively and a growing number of digits in the counters would compromise the layout of your website.
Either way, we can now show social sharing buttons with or without their respective counter statistics – just let us know if you want us to do this when we upgrade your website.
