Version 1.9.11 of Ballyhoo Commerce is now available for upgrades and new e-commerce projects.
As usual, this release of Ballyhoo Commerce includes minor bug fixes to the e-commerce system and a number of improvements and new features including currency choice, a new language option, SEO improvements and a brand new templating system.
Price Per Metre
Price per metre is a new addition to the system that allows you to sell products that are made-to-measure, for example lengths of fabric, wood, cable or tubing. This new feature was built into the system at the request of a client who wanted to sell their products online priced by the metre.
You’ll find this new feature in the Product Manager when you add or edit a product. When adding the price of a product you can now specify whether the price is per item (each) or per metre.
Customers at the front-end of the site are still able to type a quantity but if a price per metre has been specified they can type in a length too.
Example: The price per metre of a product is £10. If a customer enters a quantity of 5 and specifies a length of 50 centimetres their order will be for five 50cm lengths of the product. Each length will be £5 each and the total price will be £25.
Currency
We now have the ability to specify the currency in use on an e-commerce website. Previously this was fixed as Pounds Sterling but you can now choose any currency to sell in.
Intended for our clients using Ballyhoo Commerce in other countries, this feature could also be useful for international sellers who want to adopt a widely recognised currency such as the US Dollar or Euro.
Multiple currencies aren’t supported quite yet but are in the pipeline. Look out for future releases of our e-commerce software.
Languages
Ballyhoo recently developed an e-commerce website for a client targeting the Brazilian market. The site was built on Ballyhoo Commerce and needed to support both English (EN) and Brazilian Portuguese (PT-BR).
Brazilian Portuguese is now available for use in the system joining our other supported language, Welsh (CY).
Ballyhoo Commerce can support potentially any language. At the moment we are adding these on request but hope to support many languages in the future beginning with the most popular languages such as French and German. If there are any others you would like to see supported, please let us know.
PayPal Improvements
PayPal instant payment notifications have been problematic in the past so we’ve taken steps to ensure that our PayPal integration is more robust so if there are ever any issues the system can deal with them with ease.
Ballyhoo Commerce already has a good error logging system, so if anything goes wrong it’s recorded and we can see where to rectify the issue. This improvement means that the log records more data if there’s ever a problem with PayPal and any issues can be ironed out as swiftly as possible.
New Templating System
You may be aware of our new content management system, Ballyhoo Refresh. New technologies available when we built the templating system for Refresh prompted us to re-assess how templates are built in Ballyhoo Commerce and re-develop this area of the e-commerce system.
The result is a more modular system that’s really flexible and makes it easier to integrate and tie in with other pieces of software such as WordPress.
Google Product Feed
Your site’s Google product feed is now externally accessible meaning you can give Google the URL of your product feed rather than manually submitting it whenever you want to update your list of products.
Google are able to check it whenever they want and it will always be the latest version as it is updated in real-time.
SEO Improvements
We’re constantly making search engine optimisation (SEO) improvements to boost our e-commerce websites’ visibility in search engines. We work closely with a search engine expert to make sure that the changes we make are in line with the latest Google algorithms and factors affecting search engine rankings.
Version 1.9.11 includes general improvements to the meta tags (hidden information about your website that only search engines can read) and page titles and more importantly changes to the category structure to prevent duplicate content. There were issues with the way categories can be re-ordered and have multiple pages so we’ve improved the way these are output – Google and other search engines like to see unique content so it’s important that every page is individual.
