April 2020 • Volume 26 • Issue 2

April 2020: AbleCommerce 9.0.2 released!

Coronavirus Statement

All AbleCommerce team members are now working from home, and we are doing cross-training in crucial areas to keep things going if needed. As we have in the past 26 years, we will be here to support you!

With our warm regards, our thoughts and our prayers.

Your's truly
Team AbleCommerce

AbleCommerce 9.0.2 with Zapier support. Connect your store with thousands of other applications!

We are excited to announce support for industry leading application integration platform Zapier.

Connect AbleCommerce with over 2000 applications and automate workflows with Triggers, Actions and Searches–

New Order Trigger: Send order details to other applications when a new order placed. e.g., QuickBooks.
New User Signup: Add users to Mail Chimp, Constant Contact, and other applications.
New Product: Automatically update your Facebook and Twitter feed when new products get added.
New Order Note: Create a help desk case when a customer adds an order note.
New Abandoned Basket: Create a workflow to send a discount coupon to the shopper and alert the sales department to follow u
Create User: Add a new user to the store.
Create product simple: Add a product to the store with the primary data.
Create product advanced: Add a product with full product details.
Update product for Google: SEO attributes and Google feed can be maintained via spreadsheet, for example.
Update prices and inventory: Keep your products up to date easily via Google Sheets and other applications.
Find product search
Find user search and, if not found, optionally create them.

Please join our Zapier early access program and create your first zap today! We have many more triggers, and actions ready to publish once were out of the early access program with Zapier.

Full documentation on creating your first Zap is available on our AbleCommerce help site.

Please sign up for a free 14-day online demo or download to install on your server.

We've upgraded AbleCommerce.com to our latest 9.0.2 version!

While other eCommerce sites run static HTML sites, we've utilized our ecommerce platform for our website for decades. We are thrilled to be able to take advantage of our new content management system, keeping our site up to date with AbleCommerce Gold often required us to dig through files and code. Now we'll be able to click edit to make a quick change without ever having to leave our browser window.

Past NEWS you may of missed

AbleCommerce 9 is the ONLY PA-DSS 3.2 Certified ASP.net Shopping Cart!

Did you know that only 14 companies have a current certification for their ecommerce application? Eleven of which are either vertical market or high-end enterprise-level applications. That makes AbleCommerce 1 of 3 shopping cart applications which are aimed at providing small to medium businesses with the official backing from the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council. Chase bank has stopped onboarding new merchants without this certification, and there will likely be other major banking institutions to do the same. It’s not worth the risk, so keep your customer’s data secure!

Complete Content Management System

Let's take a deeper dive into the content management system. AbleCommerce has been able to add webpage content to a store for over a decade, so what's new?

With AbleCommerce 9 you can perform WYSIWYG editing from the retail side with a preview before publishing capability.
You can easily add HTML blocks to the page and re-arrange the content on the page with a smooth drag and drop system.
You can change the colors of common store elements such as buttons, background, input forms, and text with a color picker. Want to change the font type in your store? You can do that too.
It's now easy to change store text with our localization system. You no longer have to edit files to make a label change like the 'Add to Cart' button where you prefer it say 'Add to Basket'. Just mouse over the text, click edit icon and update it to your preference.
Create entirely new page layouts for webpages, categories, products, and blog pages using the industry standard bootstrap 12 column layout with our visual designer.
For those that are familiar with AbleCommerce Gold, all of the past conlib controls are replaced with widgets, which can be dropped onto the page in preview mode. Many of the widgets allow you easily edit the display settings without referencing any HTML code or documentation.
When you are modifying content on the retail side, your changes only affect the page you are on. You can also make broad storewide changes using the content management system on the administrative side. The system is flexible enough to allow for mass updates and individual page overrides.

New Responsive Administration

Process orders on the go, at the beach, or anywhere in the world using the new mobile responsive administration. The entire merchant admin has been brought up-to-date by utilizing the latest HTML and JavaScript techniques to make tasks as quick and easy as possible. You will no longer have to search your computer to upload images, simply drag and drop them into the upload box and they are auto-resized for you.

All New Responsive store

New streamlined HTML and cascading style sheets load fast on mobile devices and are highly optimized for search engine rankings. Our new store layout allows for the use of much larger product images, giving customers the kind of product detail that they expect today. The programming code is upgraded to MVC which cleanly separates application code from the HTML code, so designers won’t have to wade through pages they don't understand. This makes it simple for designers to quickly implement a custom storefront design!

New Features

A key safety feature has been integrated to keep your store safe and secure. Enable Google's multi-factor authentication to make sure that only authorized users will be able to access the merchant administration.
Google Recaptcha can be used instead of the standard image captcha to replace the obsolete (and often difficult to read) number verification on login. Google Recaptcha is now standard for human detection, so you can keep your customer-facing forms secure from automated or blunt-force attacks.
The new “Shipping Groups” feature allows you to handle challenging shipping scenarios while keeping the customer’s choices easy to manage. In the prior version, multiple warehouses had to be used to offer different shipping options, which resulted in multiple shipments and higher shipping costs. With Ship Groups, you can set up common shipping methods and then apply them to products of the same type that ship by the same methods. This results in fewer selections for the customer and a lower total shipping costs.
Google Structured Product Data improves your product listing on Google. According to the Search Engine Journal:

"Structured data is an important part of gaining visibility online. Structured data offers the benefits of enhanced listings and the ability to rank better. ... It is in the interest of all search marketers to add structured data to their web pages in order to gain an edge over the competition."

If you have used our previous version, then you are likely familiar with “Featured Products” management. In this version, you will also be able to create “Featured Categories” and use the built-in widget to display them on most pages.
A product “unit” field is now available for any product so you can specify exactly what the price applies to. e.g. $5.00 per dozen or $25 per hour.
There are many feature enhancements on the admin side to make your day-to-day tasks quicker and easier! We’ve implemented new pages where you can use a variety of search parameters to find products and assign (or unassign) them with quick mass updates.

New Subscription Based Pricing

Over the last 25 years things have changed (a bit), though one thing has remained the same for our team. Our goal of helping individuals and companies succeed. In 2019, we are taking bold steps outside of what we've done over the last two-and-a-half decades, with the goal of helping even more startups with a robust ecommerce system as their foundation for success. With the introduction of a free edition for startups and new subscription-based pricing model, nearly anyone can leverage AbleCommerce to power their dreams.

ALERT: Remove your AbleCommerce GOLD /install Directory!

While assisting customers with support issues we are seeing the dashboard alert to remove the install directory more frequently than we should be..which is never. Leaving the directory in place can allow bad actors to shutdown your store by altering the database connection string or license key.

Tax Experts Explain Supreme Court Decision on Nexus

In the recent South Dakota v. Wayfair case, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of South Dakota, granting the state authority to impose sales tax obligations on out-of-state transactions.

What does this mean for online sellers, and how will it impact their business?

Our partners at Avalara are bringing together two leading tax policy experts - Scott Peterson and Rachel Le Mieux, CPA, CMI - to break down the ruling and explain:

Whether remote sellers need to file and register in more states
How the ruling affects future laws across other states
How to determine whether you’re on the hook for sales tax based on where you conduct business

This is one video you can't afford to miss!

Duration: One hour

Watch Now

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