We've been hard at work with some new features and improvements on the Shopstar platform and are excited to share them with you today.

We have brought on additional members to the Shopstar development team, and will be accelerating the addition of new features and continue to work on enhancing the existing features you’re already using.

Some of our biggest new features in the history of Shopstar are in the works and we can’t wait to make them available to you.

WHAT'S NEW?

Checkout Process

Over the last few weeks we have completely overhauled the carts & checkout process, and applied some major enhancements to its stability and performance. We hope this will drive an increased success rate during checkout.

Product Search

The search system has gone through another major upgrade, and is now a much smarter and more intuitive feature. The new search is capable of handling many different scenarios, such as:

stemming - tomatoes matches tomato

special characters - jalapeno matches jalapeño

extra whitespace - dishwasher matches dish washer

misspellings - zuchini matches zucchini

Order Numbers

We recently rolled out a change to remove the concept of .invoice numbers. and purely use 'order numbers'. You can read more about this change here.

Blogs

A few weeks ago we added the ability for our customers to be able to add blog posts to their shopfront. We hope you can generate some fresh content and drive some sales!

Shopstar Marketplace

Additional search and filtering options have been added to the ‘Browse Marketplace’ screen, which will allow you to further refine and find products that match your needs. Some of these include filtering by Supplier Rating, Availability and Supplier Type.

Marketplace Sync

We’ve consistently been working on making sure the Shopstar Marketplace sync functionality is both efficient and accurate. We’ve made drastic improvements here, and will be releasing more new features and improvements to the marketplace sync soon.

Product Feeds (Facebook & Google)

We recently implemented the ability to add Google Product Categories to your Facebook and Google shopping feeds. For more information about this change, click here.

Custom Code

You can now add any custom code you need to have on your site. You can find this under Settings -> General.

Invoice Downloads

You can now browse historic invoices from Shopstar under your profile. Click on Profile (in the top right), and then on “Invoices” to see a list and request for one to be mailed to you automatically.

Shopstar Status

We added a little blue dot in the top right hand menu. This dot shows the status of the Shopstar platform, and if you click on it you can see a detailed overview of how all the components of our system are performing.

BUG FIXES & IMPROVEMENTS

STOREFRONT: Checkout - Stock quantities have been given an upgrade and should now be more robust in handling race conditions between customer checkouts.

STOREFRONT: Checkout - Incrementing has been fixed and increments by values of 1.

STOREFRONT: Checkout - Marketplace Checkout on an iPhone 7 was a bit squashed and not aligned nicely.

STOREFRONT: Checkout - Rare edge cases where stock would appear as -1 in an order has been patched.

STOREFRONT: Supplier View - Colour was not changing behind each block. This has been fixed.

STOREFRONT: Notice Bar has been adjusted to work better on all shapes and sizes of devices.

STOREFRONT: Newsletter subscription was behaving inconsistently and has been upgraded.

STOREFRONT: Vouchers - Improved the layout of vouchers during the checkout process.

STOREFRONT: Checkout - Collection option will now only show to people who it is applicable to based on their location.

STOREFRONT: Fonts - We added a few more Google Fonts to choose from while designing your store.

ADMIN: Orders - Removed the ability to cancel an Abandoned Order as it was redundant.

ADMIN: Orders - Added the ability to click on an Abandoned Order ID to view instead of only using actions menu.

ADMIN: Categories - Categories now show in alphabetical order.

ADMIN: Stock - Stock upgrades have been done to improve the accuracy of stock states.

ADMIN: Marketplace - Some payment reminders would not appear correctly for customers. This has been remedied.

ADMIN: Tags - Removing tags would sometimes cause an error.

ADMIN: Discounts - Some product titles would cause an issue when visiting the discounts page in your dashboard.

ADMIN: Stock Management - The ‘Select All’ button was not working correctly after applying filters.

ADMIN: Vouchers - Vouchers were being removed from orders after being cancelled. They will now persist.

ADMIN: Pages - Editing pages and sliders has had a UX tweak to make the edit process clearer.

GENERAL: SSL issuance was recently upgraded and some certificates were not renewing. This has been solved.

GENERAL: Shopstar logo and address has been changed on invoices.

GENERAL: Product feeds now show the supplier name of the product more accurately instead of the shop name (Marketplace Only).

GENERAL: When Marketplace Payout reports spanned multiple pages, there was a text overlap which has been fixed.

GENERAL: Sometimes an issue would occur when resubscribing to a Shopsar Plan. This has been fixed.

There have been many smaller fixes and improvements over the last while, and we look forward to making sure both you and your customers have the best experience on Shopstar.

If you have any questions, comments for feedback, please feel free to send it through to support@shopstar.co.za and we'll be happy to help.