Although this is a minor release that fixes bugs, it also brings new features and PHP 7 support, which speeds up your store and makes it more enduring:
See other changes in the changelog.
Speed and stamina are important for a website. Make a visitor wait too long for the page to load—he leaves. Make a visitor see your store crashes—he never returns. Good performance is especially critical for an online store because when a visitor leaves your store, you lose a potential customer and money.
CS-Сart 4.3.6 speeds up your store and enables it to withstand a higher load on PHP 7—it’s confirmed as the fastest version of PHP, it even beats HHVM.
We’ve taken the cheapest 5-dollar VPS hosting on DigitalOcean and compared the performance of CS-Cart 4.3.6 on PHP 7 and PHP 5.6 to one of the most popular CMS—WordPress.
WordPress is known for its simplicity and light functionality. CS-Cart, which has a richer set of ecommerce features, shows superiority in performance tests:
It’s important to keep your store software up to date to ensure security, speed, and feature richness. But moving to the new CS-Cart version could be a painful procedure sometimes—upgrading can cause issues on some servers or if your store is deeply modified.
Now, here comes Store Import. Simply transfer all of your store’s data to the new CS-Cart installation, keeping your current store online. First, if something is not working after the import, you still have your old store up and running. Second, you continue selling in your old store while configuring the new one after the successful import.
You can import your store data from CS-Cart 2.2.4 and higher, both Professional and Ultimate.
To make CS-Cart clearer and easier to use, we’ve added links to tracking numbers so you can quickly access a carrier’s parcel-tracking page from the admin panel, made the UPS delivery period look clearer, and included the new Subcategories tree display style of categories:
Multi-Vendor 4.3.6 supports an anticipated feature—Vendor plans that allows a marketplace admin to create subscription plans for the vendors.
We haven’t yet included the Vendor plans add-on in the Multi-Vendor 4.3.6 installation package because we’re going to be testing the add-on and putting the finishing touches according to your suggestions.
Keep an eye on our forum so as not to miss the post about Vendor plans containing installation and configuration instructions.
The Vendor plans add-on is a flexible tool that helps you increase your revenue if used wisely:
The Vendor’s terms and conditions add-on in Multi-Vendor 4.3.6 allows vendors to specify their terms and conditions so that the customers accept them at checkout.
Terms and conditions act as a legal contract between a vendor and a customer. It’s important for a vendor to have his/her own terms and conditions—this will demarcate liability between the marketplace owner and the vendor, and help to handle conflicts between a customer and a vendor.
A vendor specifies the terms and conditions on the vendor editing page in Vendor → Vendors:
At checkout, customers must accept the terms and conditions of each vendor, whose products they are buying:
On a Multi-Vendor marketplace, vendors can have their own microstores with filters, search by vendor’s products, and categories.
Marketplace admins often allow vendors to use all the categories available in their marketplaces, but vendors usually do not use all of them. In the previous Multi-Vendor versions, unused categories were displayed in a vendor’s microstore, and customers could view those empty categories. As a result, customers could get confused.
In Multi-Vendor 4.3.6, empty categories vendors don’t use are not displayed in a vendor’s microstore.
A marketplace admin must approve new vendors before they can sell. If an admin is unsure whether to approve a vendor or not, he sets the vendor’s status to Pending. In the Pending status, a vendor can access his admin panel, change the company information, and add products.
In earlier Multi-Vendor versions, an admin could set the Pending status only once—right after the vendor completed registration.
If an active vendor is reorganizing his business, or moving all his supplies to a new warehouse, he needs to suspend selling. The Pending status is the best option for that—the vendor still can manage the microstore, but customers don’t see this vendor’s products in the marketplace.
In Multi-Vendor 4.3.6, an active vendor can ask the marketplace admin to change his status to Pending at any time.
Before upgrading to CS-Cart 4.3.6, make sure that your server has PHP 5.3.6 or newer—older PHP versions are no longer supported.