New Features in ProStores 9.3.2

With ProStores 9.3.2, we continue to add enhancements designed to improve sales conversion and efficiency with order management, as well as increase the satisfaction of your buyers when shopping in your store. Merchants can now place a category or subcategory of products on sale, adjust invoice discounts for partial orders and easily access a summary of pending orders. Shoppers can now checkout through a streamlined multi-page checkout flow on a merchant’s store, with better breadcrumb navigation the ability to continue shopping without losing information already entered.

Key features are listed below. For more details, please see the Release Notes.

ProStores Analytics

Track and Measure Performance To Help Optimize Your Store

Site traffic and sales metrics are available through a new Analytics manager in ProStores. Get at-a-glance summary trends on the analytics dashboard, or more detailed sales and visits information displayed in tabular chart and line chart graphics. Pull data from the previous seven day period, including pre-defined, last x days and custom date ranges. Metrics included are:

• Total Visits
• Total Page Views
• Unique Shoppers
• New Shoppers
• Returning Shoppers
• Average # of Page Views per Visit
• Average Time Spent in Store per Visit
• Top Referrers (#, %, $)
• Bounce Rate

Category Promotions

With Category Promotions, you can now offer “percent off” or “flat amount” discounts on an entire category or subcategory of products. If you’re already a current ProStores subscriber, you no longer have to create a large number of product promotions to support clearance or category sales. Save time by simply creating a Clearance or On Sale category to assign products to and then create a merchandising ad on your homepage to drive awareness.

We’ve also made entering discount amounts more intuitive and added easy access to online help.

On the storefront, your customers will be able to see how much they are saving on the Shopping Cart and Invoice pages. Merchants can turn this feature on or off and control the discount display format from the General Preferences page.

Improved Checkout Experience for Your Customers

Merchants can choose to select one-page checkout or the new, streamlined, multipage checkout flow that combines billing and shipping address. We’ve made a number of enhancements designed to improve conversion and shopper satisfaction including:

• breadcrumbs that allow shoppers to backup and correct previous entries
• ability for items to be added to cart while retaining previously entered information
• confirmation entry of shopper’s e-mail address
• better exposure of gift wrapping options
• clearer instructions and help when asking for card security code from shoppers
• state selection via a select when the country is US

On both the one-page and multi-page checkout flow options, the store credit field will now only be displayed on invoices if store credits exist. Also, a new customer who checks out using an e-mail address already in the system will receive a “User Already Exists” message and can recover their password.

Support for Store Inventory Format Removal Change on eBay

If you use ProStores to list products to eBay, the Store Inventory Format option is no longer available as we comply with recent changes on eBay. Any listing templates that previously specified SIF will now display as "Fixed Price." Any other eBay integration calling out SIF (product sync, Outbound Listings) will no longer show SIF.

Manual Adjustment of Invoice Discounts

Do you have customers returning portions of an order and need an easier way to adjust invoice discounts? You can now easily decrease the flat amount off discount amount for store level promotions on an invoice when your customers return a portion of an order.

Quick Access to Pending Orders

Save time with faster, easier access to your pending orders. From your Store Administration home page, click on a link to get to a summary of orders in a pending status classified by payment type, supplier, and other parameters.

Improved Customer Experience When Using PayPal

Shoppers who purchased items from your store and used PayPal Standard used to click on the "return to store" link at PayPal and find their previously filled shopping carts emptied. Now, your customers can pay at PayPal but return to your store with cart still stocked, so there is no need for them to refill it and checkout again.

Also, your customers will also only receive a "thank you for your order" e-mail once they actually complete payment at PayPal. The invoice will be deleted from the "Pending PayPal" queue in Store Administration when the buyer clicks the "Cancel and return" link on PayPal so you won't have to wonder about payment status any longer.