In Version 1.9.22 of Ballyhoo Commerce we’ve introduced new features and improvements across a number of areas of the e-commerce system, including saved orders, pricing, auto-complete search, blogging and our new Tradebox integration.
Automatically Saved Orders
Abandoned orders can be very frustrating for online retailers; someone has chosen to visit your website out of hundreds of others, gone to the effort of adding products to their basket and then… nothing. Unfortunately, it’s rare you’ll be able to find out exactly why they haven’t completed their order, however genuine the reason, but with our latest e-commerce feature we hope you’ll see an increase in the number of customers returning to finish their purchase.
We gave customers the ability to save orders for later back in Version 1.9.19 and have since improved this feature in subsequent versions, most recently allowing you to specify how many days you want orders to be saved for and adding automated reminder emails to let customers know their saved orders are due to expire.
From this version onwards we will also now automatically save orders that aren’t completed within 2 hours of the first item being added to the shopping basket. To allow this the customer needs to have logged in or registered as a customer prior to the order being saved due to inactivity, so this is very much geared towards those users who have committed to the sale but have genuinely had to stop in their tracks (perhaps due to a family emergency or connectivity problems, who knows?).
An email notification will be sent to the customer to let them know the contents of their basket have been saved at current pricing and we will then follow the normal saved order procedure, e.g. with email reminders sent at regular intervals, until the order expiry date.
Tradebox Update
Following the launch of our Tradebox integration in the last version of Ballyhoo Commerce we have used customer comments to improve this feature. Your feedback is integral to the ongoing advancement of this e-commerce system so we encourage you to let us know your thoughts whenever you can – no matter how trivial the issue may seem!
Upfront Pricing
Pricing should be transparent when you are shopping online but sadly on many e-commerce websites customers are still caught out at the checkout stage when additional charges like VAT and delivery are added.
We are committed to making additional charges crystal clear. We already show the customer everything they’ll be charged on the main shopping basket page but now we’ve also re-worked the shopping basket summary (the part of your website on every page that shows the customer how many items are in their basket and the total value) to show the final price the customer will pay at the checkout too. Goodbye nasty surprises.
Auto-complete Search Enhancements
The addition of our auto-complete search facility meant that customers could find the product they were looking for within seconds of typing the first few letters of their search query. We’ve now enhanced this so that the system searches products by variant too so the customer has even more chance of finding what they want on their first search attempt.
Product variant results will be shown on both the auto-complete search drop-down selection and on the main search results page.
New Blog Features
If you’re using the blogging abilities of Ballyhoo Commerce (in the Content Manager) you’ll be pleased to hear that we’ve added a few new features for you in this version too.
We will now be able to add custom styling to blog posts (when we upgrade your website or develop a new Ballyhoo Commerce website from scratch), you’ll have the ability to change the published date of your blog posts and the first paragraph of your post will automatically be shown as a content excerpt on the parent Blog page.
