Ballyhoo Commerce and Ballyhoo Refresh are no longer supported. These systems were built as simple alternatives to overcomplicated e-commerce and content management platforms. However, as WordPress has matured to become more sophisticated, and our clients have expanded to more competitive markets that require enhanced functionality, we have now embraced both WordPress and WooCommerce to create flexible and advanced solutions to help our clients grow and succeed.
Ballyhoo Commerce Version 1.9 has now been released and offers many improvements, as well as minor bug-fixes, on previous versions including RSS Feeds, Canonicalisation and Multiple Payment Gateways. Our biggest improvement is the ability to select product variations and add products to the shopping basket from the category page – making it easier for customers to choose what they want and therefore increase the value of your e-commerce transactions.
Increase transaction value
Customers can now select the variations of a product on the category page, be that size, colour or any other variant. The customer can browse your products with more ease and can select exactly what they want to purchase without going to the main product page.
Following on from this we have developed a pop-up information feature. When your customer clicks ‘Add To Basket’ a dialogue box appears to inform them that this has been successful. This prevents the customer unwantedly being taken away from the product pages to the shopping basket. This feature has also been employed elsewhere within the system, for example when a customer enters the wrong information in their account log-in. The rest of the page ‘greys-out’ and customers can exit the box or simply click anywhere on the screen to continue what they are doing.
Related products
Related Products now use the same format as the new category pages. This provides a consistent shopping experience for your customers.
RSS feed
Customers can now choose to subscribe to an RSS feed of your products. Whenever you add, edit or update a product your customers will be made aware of the changes. Not only is this beneficial for your customers, Google may favour your site in its rankings for demonstrating that efforts are being made to communicate with your users.
Multiple payment gateways
Ballyhoo now offers you the option to install multiple payment gateways for your customers to choose from. Some customers grow used to certain payment gateways and only want to use those they are familiar with – give your customers confidence to go through with the transaction. Ballyhoo now supports the following gateways:
In the Order Manager on your Ballyhoo Dashboard you can now see comments sent back from the payment gateway your customer chose. These are as simple as ‘Payment Accepted’ or ‘Not Authorised’.
Canonicalisation
This is a buzzword in Search Engine Optimisation at the moment and refers to ensuring there is only one entry point to a website. For example, if you go to the effort of making links and references to your site on other websites but these forego the ‘www.’ prefix Google may assume that it is a completely different site and thus will not improve your search engine rankings accordingly. In reality, you are diluting the effects of these in-bound links.
The good news is that Ballyhoo now employs a 301 Redirect to ensure that all links such as these are permanently redirected to the actual address of your website.
Latest news
Also on your Ballyhoo Dashboard you can now get a live feed (see RSS feeds) from this website to show you the latest articles and news from Ballyhoo Ltd. Keep on top of software releases and new services.
HTML sitemap
This sitemap will help your search engine optimisation as it creates a keyword-rich page which Google and other engines can use to rank your site. Ballyhoo is constantly improving the way our e-commerce software works to ensure your site is search engine friendly, sitemaps being but one example.
To upgrade your current e-commerce website or for any more information please contact us.
