Version 1.9.15 of our e-commerce system Ballyhoo Commerce is packed with new features including a new payment gateway and enhanced product controls to make selling online easier than ever.
E-Commerce Product Management
Quick Edit Your Products
A Quick Edit feature has been added to the Product Manager section of this e-commerce system. Making small tweaks to product information will be quicker than ever because you won’t need to access the full product details of each individual product on your e-commerce website.
You can use Quick Edit to update Price, RRP, Reference, Manufacturer and which Product Categories the product is listed under.
Category Product Display Options
Factors like your e-commerce website design and which products you’re focusing on selling can make a big impact on how you want to display your product categories. In the Category Editor we’ve added the following product display options under the heading Show Products:
- All Products: all products in that product category will be displayed when a user visits the category page. This is the default option for all Ballyhoo e-commerce websites.
- Featured Products Only: the category page will only display products listed as Featured (you can set this in the Product Manager). This is a great option if you are pushing the sale of certain products or you have a special promotion.
- None: No products will be shown under the selected category. This is a good option if you have lots of sub-categories where the page can tend to look too busy if everything is displayed. The customer will have to navigate to the desired sub-category to view any products.
Product PDF Downloads
You can now upload a PDF for each product which will be available for download by customers on the product page. This is great if there’s lots of information about the product which you don’t want to include on the product page itself.
Product brochures, technical datasheets and user manuals are all good examples of the kind of document you can upload for your customers.
E-Commerce Administration
Administrator Email Preferences
In the User Manager of the e-commerce admin area you can now choose to add an email address for a website administrator – or not.
Currently, whenever an order is received or a product enquiry is submitted, each administrator with access to your e-commerce administration area receives a notification email. If you receive a large volume of orders and enquiries the level of emails can be overwhelming, especially if it’s not your role to dispatch orders or respond to emails.
By having the ability to choose whether to specify an email address for each admin you’ll have more control over which members of staff deal with each aspect of your online shop and will cut down man-hours deleting unwanted emails.
Add Log Out Link To Any Content List
You will now have the ability to add a Log Out link to any content list on your website. Places to add a Log Out link include the main navigation of the site, the footer or in the shopping summary section of the website header.
The Log Out link will only be displayed to customers who are already logged in to your website. You can add it by accessing the Content Manager in your e-commerce admin area.
Improved Order Comments
Order comments in the Order Manager of your admin area have been improved to display whether an order has been manually authorised.
This can be useful if you take payment for a website order over the phone and then mark the payment as authorised in the Order Manager. This situation can arise if a customer starts an order on your e-commerce website but has difficulty making payment online.
E-Commerce Customer Features
Pre-Populated Online Forms
Logged in customers making an enquiry or emailing a product to a friend will find that the online form has been pre-populated with details such as their name and email address.
Mandatory Customer Registration
We can now change a setting in your e-commerce website to make customer registration mandatory if customers want to use features such as Make An Enquiry. This can be useful if you have hidden your product prices and want to collect customer data.
Partially Hidden Category Descriptions
Adding lots of content to your product categories is fantastic for search engines but not so great for the usability of your website.
We can now alter the category description visibility on your website where a Read More link will be shown whenever the volume of content exceeds the standard space allocated. This will allow customers to read the full category description if they wish but clean up the page for those customers who just want to see your products.
Hiding extra text in this way doesn’t affect the way search engines see your site, making this a great way to add keyword-rich content to your site without overwhelming customers.
Improved Buttons
We’ve improved our code to add the ability to set button styles across your entire website. If you ever want to fully update your website design or make small design tweaks this is one more area where we can save time and save you money.
Pay4Later E-Commerce Payment Gateway
Pay4Later is an online consumer credit service that you can now use with Ballyhoo Commerce to help customers afford your products.
A number of credit options are available to you to choose for your customers, including interest-free repayments. More information about the Pay4Later credit scheme is available on their website at pay4later.com.
We’ve fully integrated Pay4Later with our e-commerce software. On the shopping basket page of your website, customers with a qualifying order value will be able to use a finance calculator to work out how much their monthly repayments are likely to be. At the checkout your customer will choose which finance option they want to use (from a list pre-selected by you) and state how much deposit they would like to pay now (the system displays min/max values automatically calculated from their order value to help them).
By clicking Proceed your customer will be directed to a Pay4Later page with your branding where they can fill out the necessary forms to obtain credit. The decision process takes just 10 seconds and the process is completed entirely online.
Please speak to us about using Pay4Later with your website.
