Version 1.9.20 of Ballyhoo Commerce brings considerable enhancements to our e-commerce offering. A major improvement has been made to the way you edit content on your website and you’ll also find some great progress in areas such as price comparison, auto-complete search and saved orders.
It’s never been so easy to edit text!
Ballyhoo Commerce gives you a richly-featured text editing suite so you can easily format your product descriptions and content pages – much the same way as you would in a word processing program. Advanced users can even access the raw html of the page to create more complex layouts and styling.
The software we use to power this feature of your e-commerce administration area has now been upgraded to the latest version to give you some great new features to use in the everyday maintenance of your online shop.
As with any software upgrade, fixes for some bugs identified in previous versions are also included.
In-line Editing
Previously, when uploading images, adding links or editing html, windows with the extra features needed to carry out these tasks would open independently. As you may have experienced, having several windows open at once can be a little confusing. In this version the additional windows now open in-line with your browser, eliminating the clutter on your screen.
Resizeable Text Area
When adding or editing text you can now expand the text area to the dimensions of your choice by clicking and dragging from the bottom-right corner of the box.
Expanding the area will give you a better idea of content flow and reduce time spent scrolling through text in the editor.
Spellchecking
Correctly spelled words are not only reportedly good for search engines, they also impact the way customers perceive your professionalism – surely there’s no excuse for typos in this day and age?
An integrated spellchecker is now included in the text editor which is especially useful for those of you who write your content on the fly. Typos could be a thing of the past!
All new price comparison feeds
In an increasingly frugal shopping climate, price comparison engines are becoming the first port of call for many online shoppers. With Ballyhoo Commerce you can capitalise on this increasing trend to get your products in front of an ever-widening shopping audience.
The majority of price comparison engines use a pay-per-click model so you only pay a fee each time a shopper makes the decision to visit your website. As such, an increased marketing budget is required to make the most of this type of online shopping channel.
Introducing Become.com
We’re happy to announce that Become.com is the latest price comparison engine to be integrated with Ballyhoo Commerce. Become is predominately a comparison shopping website but also features buying guides and product reviews. Their data feeds are used by a number of other price comparison websites so there’s a good chance your products will be seen by a wider audience than anticipated.
A product feed especially for Become is now a standard feature of Ballyhoo Commerce so all you need to worry about is setting up and maintaining your account with them (we can even help with this!).
Google Analytics URLs
Having as much information as possible about the visits to your website can only be a good thing. Ballyhoo Commerce now uses Analytics Tracking URLs as standard in all product feeds to enable you to capitalise on the extra information they can give about visits to your website.
These URLs provide your Analytics account with valuable additional information beyond the usual data enabling you to tailor reports to measure the success of your marketing campaigns and evaluate how much revenue is really being generated by your investment in price comparison.
Automatically collected Shopzilla feed
A Shopzilla feed has been a part of Ballyhoo Commerce for many years, allowing you to upload your products to their price comparison engine.
Recent improvements they’ve made to their systems mean we can now set your Shopzilla product feed to be automatically collected. This eliminates the time you regularly need to take to upload your most recent feed to their system, meaning you can spend more time on other aspects of your online business.
Manufacturers added to auto-complete search results
In each new version of Ballyhoo Commerce we’re building on the auto-complete search feature we added in version 1.9.18, introducing category results in 1.9.19 and now manufacturer results in 1.9.20.
Many of you stock several products by the same manufacturer and with customers ever more aware of branding and the desire/necessity to have matching items, it seemed natural to include manufacturers in search results.
Saved order enhancements
Again, we’re trying to build on the Save Order feature we first introduced in version 1.9.19 in each new version of Ballyhoo Commerce.
In this version we now allow you to specify how many days you want saved orders to be valid for and we’ve also added automated reminder emails for customers who haven’t resumed their orders – letting them know at set intervals that their order is due to expire.
Other improvements in 1.9.20…
As per usual a number of minor improvements have also been made to functionality, usability and performance. In particular we’ve introduce more SEO improvements, fixed a number of validation issues with social sharing and made restricted features more obvious when a user is not logged in.
