CS-Cart and Multi-Vendor 4.7.1 now available!

Hello!

A new minor update is here! Meet CS-Cart and Multi-Vendor 4.7.1!

In CS-Cart update, we focused on order management and export/import enhancements. Check the full list of new features and fixes in the changelog. And here are changes for developers.

Most of the new features are based on CS-Cart users’ requests, so thank you guys for your feedback!

Order Management Features

Both creating and editing orders in the admin panel have become easier. Plus, we reworked the Buy in advance function.

• Order editing is now faster: 1) edit an order without using a mouse—press Tab to switch over the fields; 2) search for a product by its code—you’ll never add a wrong product to your customer’s order; 3) search for a customer by phone number and email—you’ll always pick the right customer even if you have the same names in your list.
  
• Order status sorting by drag and drop: Now, an admin can sort order statuses so that their sequence fits the business workflow of the store.
  
• Reworked “Buy in advance”: Customer can now buy a product in advance regardless, of the number of items available and the availability date.
  

Export/Import Improvements

• The Popularity field. Some CS-Cart users expanded export/import by adding the Popularity field. They use it to quickly sort products in categories. Now, you no longer need to code it—we have added the Popularity field by default.
• Field names are in your native language. Names of the export/import fields were always in English. Some non-English speakers didn’t understand the meaning of some fields, so field names are now displayed in the language of your admin panel.
• Quick search for recently updated products. When you import products, hundreds of them are updated. To check or to correct their parameters after import, you had to search for them manually. It wasn’t much fun. But now, there’s a saved product search in the admin panel that you can use to view all the recently imported and updated products.
• Skip creating new products. If this setting is on, the import will only update the existing products without creating new ones. This setting helps to simplify the import process and reduce errors.

All Available Variations on a Product Page

Product variations are a more advanced model to manage product options than option combinations. More and more CS-Cart customers are switching to variations. So we can clearly see that the future belongs to product variations. Learn what they are and what they’re capable of in the previous article.

In CS-Cart 4.7.1, customers see the list of all product variations on the product page, both in stock and out of stock. This way, they can see what variations are in stock and compare prices. Customers can add variations to the cart right from this list.

Usability Improvements

CS-Cart has become easier and more convenient to use:

• By default, a required option variant is not selected on the product page: Now, customers can’t add a product to cart if they don’t select the variant of a required option.
  
• Banner management is more convenient now: On the Marketing → Banners page, you can search for banners and filter them. You can also set the order of showing banners on the storefront when you add them to the Banners block.
  
• Ability to remove the “Free shipping” text from the checkout without consequences: If you don’t need this text on checkout, or you want to change it, go to Administration → Languages → Translations, search for the Free shipping language variable and delete or edit its value. Previously when you deleted this text, a hyphen was displayed instead of it. Now, there’s no hyphen.
  
• Right-to-left language fixes: The country code now displays correctly in phone numbers; some symbols, buttons, and tooltips are now OK, too; banner slider is fixed, as well. We’d like to thank our customers for reporting these RTL issues.
• TinyMCE text editor was updated: We’ve updated the editor and fixed the issue with the payment method settings page freezing in Mozilla Firefox.
• The Ping++ payment aggregator is in the box now. This is a payment aggregator from China that gathers 14 payment gateways. Check the documentation.
• For developers: Developers now refresh an add-on settings and language variables by clicking the gear button by the add-on and selecting Refresh from the drop-down list. No need to re-install the add-on anymore.

Multi-Vendor 4.7.1 brings 3 new features: a payment distribution service Stripe Connect, the ability to contact a vendor from a product page, vendor blocks now appear on all the vendor micro-store pages.

Multi-Vendor 4.7.1 also contains all changes from CS-Cart 4.7.1.

Plus, this Multi-Vendor update features all the new stuff CS-Cart 4.7.1 has. Read a separate CS-Cart release post and the changelog to learn more. And here are changes for developers.

Stripe Connect

Managing an online marketplace, you naturally have to deal with money distribution. Your sellers pay commissions to you, you make payouts to them: it’s important not to mess things up.

The best way to organize money distribution is to automate it. Which is why Multi-Vendor already has a built-in payment distribution system called PayPal Adaptive. Unfortunately, PayPal has made it permanently unavailable—you won’t be able to register in PayPal Adaptive by yourself. We can help you with registering individually, although who knows when PayPal will stop Adaptive once and for all?

That’s why we’ve added a similar payment distribution system from Stripe—Stripe Connect. Check the documentation to learn how to enable and set it up.

Customer-to-Vendor Communication

When a customer is hesitating to choose the product, the opportunity to ask the seller about the product might well be precisely the feature needed to convert the customer into a buyer. The ability to get in touch with a seller right from the product page makes it easy and convenient and makes the product more attractive for buying.

Multi-Vendor 4.7.1 features a new add-on, Customer-to-Vendor Communication, which adds the new section Customers → Message center to the admin panel. Customers can now send messages to sellers from a product page and a seller micro-store.

Vendor Blocks on All the Vendor Micro-Store Pages

Each seller on your marketplace can have their own micro-store and can arrange blocks in the micro-store via the layout manager to make its pages look as they want.

Previously, there was an issue, in which the seller couldn’t add certain blocks, such as vendor logo and vendor categories, to pages except for the micro-store home page. This meant that a customer who opened a seller’s product page or article didn’t see their categories or logo. In fact, the customer left the micro-store, and the only way to get back was to press the back button in the web browser.

Good news: we have fixed this issue! Now, vendor blocks work on all pages, and customers who browse a seller’s products always see that seller’s logo and categories.

What do you guys think about these new features in CS-Cart and Multi-Vendor 4.7.1? We’ll be happy to read your feedback in the forum.

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