Welcome to the July 2021 release of Better Commerce. There are several updates in this version that we hope you will like, some of the key highlights include: 

Highlights

  1. PIM as an independent App: Product Information Management (PIM) is a very important tool for any eCommerce business. Understanding the need and market demand PIM has been extracted from the core platform and is launched as a separate App. This means PIM will be a module in its own and customers can subscribe to PIM as an independent module and connect it to their already running eCommerce platforms to enrich product content. It gives you complete freedom to use the advanced features of our PIM with your existing eCommerce platform without the complete re-platforming project. For example, if you’re running your eCommerce store on Magento or WooCommerce and also selling on Amazon, you could use our PIM to maintain your product data in a single repository and publish the content across your stores and marketplaces.
  2.  PIM Dashboard: A separate PIM dashboard has been created which gives you the product data overview in one shot – it answers all the important questions in one place like, how many products are without images and how many products have images? How many products don’t have a category assigned and how many categories don’t have any products? How many products have the rich content defined – full description, videos, and how many don’t have any? All this information is aimed to empower you to offer a more enriched and better customer experience to your customers.
  3. Payment Settings: The payment gateways now have the provision to configure countries and currencies. Only the mapped countries and currencies are allowed to use the enabled payment method for placing an order.
  4. Delivery SLA: In situations like the basket have standard as well as preorder items or any other product with different fulfillment types, the delivery options become indispensable to calculate the delivery plan. Hence, the existing configuration has been extended to exclude/ include a particular shipping type at the product and the fulfillment type level. For example. include standard delivery but exclude next-day shipping for preorders.
  5. Set max qty for Pre-order items: You can now simply configure the max. quantity for pre-order items beyond which the system will automatically stop any new orders being placed for the specific items. This will ensure that you don't oversell the items when they're set up for pre-orders.
  6. Build brand landing pages with customizable widgets: You can now enrich the brand landing pages by adding different widgets into the brand-specific landing pages directly from the PIM section itself. You can add the following widgets: 
    1. Product Collection
    2. Video 
    3. Image Banners
    4. HTML Snippet

PIM Enhancements

  1. PIM as a separate Module: The July 2021 release adds to our list of major accomplishments as diving deeper into headless commerce space, we have PIM as a separate module now. PIM has its unmatchable importance mostly for its capability to manage and synchronize information across various systems within your eCommerce platform. PIM is synchronized with your SKU catalogs, ERP, CRM, multiple web stores, vendors’ and suppliers’ databases to provide you with a timely and updated overview of product information.

  2. Brand widgets: Brand widgets have been enhanced recently to handle multiple occurrences of the same widgets, play video and also accept HTML type of snippets.

  3. Add bundle product: There has been a slight change in the way bundles are added. You need to select the product type from the dropdown highlighted below and select the components by clicking on Add Product.

  4. Pre-order Improvements: There have been multiple enhancements in the overall preorder handling. 
    1. While setting up preorder configurations there is a field to define the max quantity that you want to take for preorders, In case a preorder product has reached its max defined quantity, the website will now show an alert while adding it to the bag. 
    2. There has been further improvement made to prohibit the backorder flag to be enabled along with preorder. This has been done to stop any possibility of overselling. 
       
    3. Moving further, in the Order Management System, If a preorder is accidentally sent for Picking, a provision has been added to move it back to NEW rather than following the exception handling process. 
    4. An order confirmation email for preorder : In case an order contains both standard as well as preorder lines, the system will flag the preorder lines in the email, so that customers get to know those items will not be shipped along with other standard products.

  5. Pricelist Scheduler: Instructions text has been added in the interface for self-assistance to the users.

eCommerce Enhancements 

  1. The new configuration in Promotion: The new config ‘Allow only on first order’ allows the promotion to be applied on the first order of the customer. If a customer has an order history, the promotion stands invalid. This helps businesses to improve their customer acquisition rate and run targeted campaigns for first-time customers.


  2. UI Fixes: There has been significant work done on the UI part of the platform to improve the user experience and give the system a better look. Few key changes are:
    1. Updated translation and brand detail page.
    2. Updated delete confirmation popup.
    3. Updated logo in CMS page builder.
    4. Updated dashboard UI.
    5. Updated customer detail page's spacing and tab view.
    6. Updated product collection page's carousel and filter view.

  3. Direct Refund: In cases where RMAs are not created and a refund is processed by resolving an exception, an entry is made in the system to keep a track of refund lines and amounts. This information is also consumed in the return reports.

  4. Payment Settings: Payment methods can be now enabled at the country level. Specific currencies can also be mapped against a payment method to allow only the configured currencies.


OMS Enhancements

  1. Delivery SLA: In the OMS delivery SLA configuration, a provision has been added to exclude/include a particular shipping type. This is helpful in situations like the basket have standard as well as preorder items, the delivery options become very indispensable to calculate the delivery plan. Hence, the existing configuration has been extended to exclude/ include a particular shipping type at the fulfillment type level. For example. include standard delivery but exclude next-day shipping for preorders.

  2. Handling textual change in the documents: Different businesses may want to have different text on their documents for example in the return sheets. Hence a configuration has been added to maintain this at an organization level.

  3. Handling Preorder in pick screen: If a preorder is accidentally sent for Picking, a provision has been added to move it back to NEW rather than following the exception journey.

  4. Bundle product: Bundle products are a combination of components. Having clear visibility of inventory at the component level is important. This release includes the change in the interface to display the bundle components with their current On-Hand stock.



  5. User-delivery Center mapping: With this new setting, you can map users to one or more specific locations and restrict them within your organization to have access to only mapped locations/stores/warehouses.


  6. UI Improvements: There has been significant work in the UI side of the OMS as we believe in continuously improving our user experience. This release includes an updated order filter screen, button clicks, updated delete popups, product detail view.

Other changes / bug fixes

  1. Product search while resolving exception: In the commerce hub, while trying to resolve exceptions and suggesting alternates to customers, the system was not showing the relevant results as expected which has now been optimized and fixed.

  2. Membership: Customers purchased the membership but the status was not active & vouchers were left in "in transition" status. This has been resolved now. Additional validations have been added while removing membership from the basket.

  3. CMS page builder: The page versions dropdown list was not highlighting the currently active version which has now been fixed.

  4. Image tagging: The lookbook feature to tag an image had a small bug which was fixed & released in this release.

  5. Barcode printing: We've optimized the process to print the barcodes in case the QZ printer has not been set up, the system will automatically print the PDF instead of going to QZ printer.

  6. Remove Item from the basket when archived: In case an item is archived and is currently a part of any basket the platform did not allow the users to remove the items, which has now been changed and allows the users to remove the items from the basket.

  7. Image display order: While adding multiple images in a product, the system was assigning the same display order to all the images as a result of which the image display priority was not accurate on the front end. This has been fixed.

  8. Supplier: The users were not allowed to assign a supplier to a product if the supplier does not have any active pricelist. Now, the user can assign a supplier whether the pricelist is defined or not and can update the price for the supplier later on.

  9. Duplicate order display: In few cases system generated duplicate delivery notes causing duplicate display of the same order, this has been fixed in this release.

  10. Product update sync issue: When any updates were made in the PIM, the product sync process with OMS was not updating some fields, the issue occurred because of the field name mismatch which has been resolved now.