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Latest eCommerce Software Updates
We continually upgrade the InstanteStore ecommerce solution so that you can always have the most powerful and flexible solution to power your online store. Some of these are minor bug-fixes while some are major feature additions/upgrades. As an InstanteStore subscriber, you do not need to do anything to get these upgrades installed to your store. Your store is automatically upgraded. We have just started documenting these upgrades on our website, so information on all future upgrades will be posted here.
If you have any suggestions on how we can improve the InstanteStore solution, we would love to hear from you. Click here to post your suggestions |
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January - February 2006 |
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Arrange Featured, On Sale, Custom Page Listings  |
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Now you can arrange the order of your featured and on sale products. Previously, the featured and on sale products were arranged by date as well as alphabetically. Now, you can arrange them however you see fit. So, you can show the most attractive products first. That way, those products will show "above the fold" and will be visible without requiring any scrolling. You will be better able to arrest your visitor's attention with the hot products first and lure them further into your site. You can now also arrange your "Information" custom pages however you want as well. So, you can group related pages together.
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| Reciprocal Linking Directory |
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Although reciprocal linking is not as powerful as it used to be, reciprocal links from related sites are still pretty useful. Reciprocal links are useful not just in the sense of improving your search engine ranking, but if the link is from a market-related site, you will get targeted visitors sent straight from your reciprocal link partners. With this new feature, you no longer need to spend hundreds of dollars buying complicated linking directory scripts or spend countless hours trying to install those finicky scripts and making sure they work properly. The reciprocal linking directory is now built into your store. Activating it is simplicity itself. Once activated, visitors to your store can request to have a link from your store to their site. Once they've entered their details, they're then given a reciprocal link code that they can paste into their site. It's a good idea to have links that point not just to your store's main page but to other internal pages as well. So, you can enter multiple reciprocal links when activating this feature. The script will randomly select a reciprocal link from the ones you have entered and show it to your visitor. That way, you can have incoming links with different link text which point to different URLs. This makes the links look more "natural".
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GoogleBase Product Download  |
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Another big one. You can now export your store's products into Google Base. We chose the RSS 2.0 format and it works like a treat. Simply choose the Google Base format when downloading your product details and your store will spit out the file in the right format. Upload that file through your Google Base account and your products can be shown on Google Base/Froogle within an hour. As an added bonus, since we chose the "RSS 2.0" format, the generated feed can be read by any other RSS feed reader. So, if you want to let your visitors download your full product inventory to their computer, you can. Just generate the Google Base XML file and upload it to your store. Then just add a link to that XML file on one of your store's borders (or anywhere else). Now, your visitors can point their RSS reader/aggregator at that URL and instantly view your whole product inventory on their own computers.
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| Endicia Packing Slip Integration |
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To make product fulfillment even easier, we have integrated support for the very handy Endicia service. With Endicia, you can literally print out your own USPS postage on your own computer. All you need is an Endicia account and their software that you can download for free from their site. So, when you process orders, you literally just select the orders you want to send out using USPS and choose to export your order details in the Endicia format. Your store will generate the Endicia XML file for you. Feed that file into Endicia's Dazzle software and your printer will churn out all the relevant address labels with embedded USPS postage. No more waiting in line at the post office. Woo-hoo!
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October - December 2005 (Q4 2005) |
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| Shareasale Product Download |
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We've just added a way for you to quickly and easily (isn't that always the case :-)) export your products to the ShareaSale.com affiliate network. ShareASale.com lets you put up your products so that their affiliate force can choose which product(s) they want to promote. With our ShareASale product download, you can literally add on all your store products to their network easily.
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| New payment gateways |
Now, you can choose from our ever expanding list of supported payment gateways. 6 new payment gateways have been integrated into the solution:
- PaySat
- PayPal Website Payments Pro
- Innovative
- Tranzila
- Merchant Partners
- SwissNet
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July - September 2005 (Q3 2005) |
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| Ability To Ship Out Each Product In Multiple Packages (for USPS/UPS) |
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This feature is useful if you sell products that consist of multiple parts. For example, if you sell a computer package as a single product you might have to send out the monitor in a separate package from the main CPU. Now, you can! You can specify how many packages you need to send out for each product and the weight of each package. This way, USPS/UPS will be able to quote the correct shipping rate for the customer. So, this means no more out-of-pocket expenses for you having to "subsidize" shipping just because your ecommerce solution cannot handle multiple packages for single products...
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| Printer Friendly Product Page |
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You can now let your visitors print out your product pages in a printer-friendly format just by clicking a single button. They can print out your product page and take their time to read through it and show it to their partner/friends/family. You know how it is when you want to show this cool product to your other half/friend/family member. It's difficult to group them in front of your computer, wait for the site to load up, and then search for the product. It's easier to just print out the product page and show them the print out. This will help increase your reach. Now, you can actually reach customers who don't even have internet access :-)
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| Consume RSS Feed Content On Your Site (Available on our newer servers) |
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Do you have your own blog? Now you can show your blog content in your store using our Consume RSS Feed feature. Just enter the URL to the RSS feed you want to use and set how many items you want to show at once together with the number of characters you want to show of each item. Then paste the generated code at your store. Voila! Your store will automatically fetch the latest items in the RSS feed and statically insert the content where you pasted the generated code. With this feature, you can literally have a self-updating page without you having to do any actual work. Just find RSS feeds related to (but which do not compete with) your target market. Then use our tool and you can have the latest news related to your market show up on your store's front page, any custom pages that you add, or at your store's borders. Since search engines generally like pages that are "fresh" (content that is updated), you will be able to meet this requirement by consuming RSS feeds on your pages. This is powerful!
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| View Customer Wish Lists |
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You know that your store has an "add to wish list" feature. Your visitors will normally add items that they want to buy but perhaps haven't fully decided on, or items that they can't actually afford at the current moment. Well, now you can gain a voyeuristic view and see what item(s) your registered customers have added to their wish list. This can be found in your customer details section of your store. How is this useful, you ask? Well, now you know this customer wants this product but hasn't actually bought it yet. So, you can "seal the deal" by perhaps offering them a special discount/bonus and move them from wanting the product to actually whipping out their credit card and buying it.
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| Option SKUs |
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Many of you actually sell products with options and require each option (and option combination) to each have their own SKU/Manufacturer Number. Now, you can :-). For example if you sell T-Shirts with 3 sizes (S/M/L) and 2 colors (white/black), you can give each combination a unique SKU. So, a small black T-shirt can have SKU SBT1000 while a medium black one can be MBT1000. You get the idea. Although it doesn't actually help you sell more products, this will ease product fulfillment headaches if your product fits the description we just described.
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| Amazon ZShop Product Download |
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If you have an Amazon ZShop in addition to your InstanteStore (makes sense since Amazon has massive reach), you can now export your InstanteStore products to the Amazon ZShop format. Since starting an Amazon ZShop could be a good way for you to market your products, we have made it so much easier for you to start an Amazon store with your existing products. If you are selling commodity items or items related to anything that someone would logically search for at Amazon, you should consider opening an Amazon ZShop solely as another way to market your products. At the time of writing, they charge $39.99/month for unlimited items plus a transaction fee per order.
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| Product Review without Registration |
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You know that your store already lets your visitors post their own reviews of your products (if you have activated the feature). Previously, your visitors had to login (or register if they hadn't already done so) before they could write product reviews. Now, you can choose to let visitors post product reviews without login/registration. Activating the customer product review function makes sense since you can literally get your visitors to add more content to your site without you having to lift a finger. Search engines (and people as well) are crazy about content, especially new, updated, and related content. So, letting visitors post reviews easily can help you grow your store content automatically. You just have to filter out any nonsensical or offensive posts.
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April - June 2005 (Q2 2005) |
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| Shipping by Product Groups |
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It is now possible to group products into their own shipping groups for shipping purposes. This allows shipping from multiple source locations (especially useful for shipping via the UPS or USPS integrated shipping methods). So, if you are using fulfillment company A located in Denver, CO to ship out your shirts while fulfillment company B located in Salt Lake City, UT ships out your pants then you're in luck. You can now group all shirts together and set your store to charge shipping according to the rates charged by fulfillment company A. Likewise, you can group all pants together and configure shipping according to the rates charged by company B. This also allows you to configure separate sets of shipping methods and rates for different types of products even if they're shipped from the same place. For example, you may use USPS to ship out most of your products. However, you use a local courier company for overweight items. You can now group your overweight items and configure a different set of shipping charges for these.
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| USPS Insured Shipping |
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If you are selling expensive items, you might want to insure all orders that you send out. Now, you can with the USPS Insured Shipping option. If you choose to insure your packages, your store will automatically take that into account when calculating the shipping charges for your customers.
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| Newsletter Revamp |
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The newsletter functions have been consolidated so that you can now easily compose and broadcast newsletters using our integrated HTML editor, view and edit draft newsletters, manage your newsletter subscribers, and view reports of your sent newsletters all from one place. Reporting has been improved so that you can now view the number of mails that have been sent, how many bounced, as well as how many people actually viewed your e-mail (for HTML emails only).
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| 2-Tier Affiliate System |
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This opens a whole new way of marketing your products. Rather than just being able to recruit affiliates and rewarding them for sales that they recommended, you can now pay commission on the 2nd tier as well. In other words, if affiliate A brings in another affiliate B and affiliate B makes a sale, you can choose to reward affiliate A as well. For example, you can pay 10% commission on sales made by the affiliate and 3% on sales made by affiliates that were recommended by your affiliate. If your profit margin can withstand this, then you can set it up and approach large list owners in your market and get them in as affiliates. These large list owners are more likely to promote 2-tier programs since their potential commission is much higher. You can also specific 2nd tier affiliate commision rates for specific products, in conjunction with the product-specific affiliate commission upgrade.
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| Affiliate Commission Email |
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You can now get your store to INSTANTLY send out an e-mail to your affiliate as soon as a customer they referred makes a purchase. Although this is a simple feature, this is powerful. Imagine someone signing up as your affiliate in the evening and sending out your link to their list before they go to bed. When they wake up in the morning and check their e-mail, their mailbox is filled with e-mails notifying them they've made a sale and the commission they've earned. This will definitely encourage your affiliates to promote you more actively!
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| Affiliate Stats Summary |
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To help you monitor the sales you're getting through your affiliates, we have tightened up our affiliate stats module as well. You can now see summarized affiliate statistics for your chosen date range at a glance. Important statistics like total visitors sent by your affiliates, total orders referred and their value, the visitor-to-buyer conversion ratio and the ALL IMPORTANT Per Visitor Value (PVV) are all at your fingertips! Statistics like PVV are extremely important especially when you approach "super affiliates". These are the people who can bring you major traffic if they choose to become your affiliate. They generally do not become your affiliate "just because you asked them to". Having statistics like the average PVV will help greatly when recruiting these "super affiliates".
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| Cross-sell Batch Upload |
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Previously, if you wanted to manually add cross-sell (upsell) items to your products, you had to do it one-by-one. Although it's simple, it can get pretty tedious if you have a lot of products. Now, you can add or remove cross-sell items to your products using the batch upload tool. So, you can now manage cross-sell items just by uploading a comma-delimited (CSV) text file. Talk about easy...
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| Re-send Supplier Email |
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Let's face it. Email is a little unreliable sometimes. There will be times when your drop shipper/supplier did not receive the order e-mail when a customer makes an order. Now, you can easily re-send them the order e-mail from your order listing page.
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| Shop.com Product Download |
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We have just added the Shop.com product download format for you. Now, you can very easily generate the product feed required by Shop.com. Just select the format and the feed is instantly generated for you. Pass the feed to Shop.com and your products will be promoted there, getting you more sales.
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January - March 2005 |
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| Split Shipping Weight option for overweight UPS/USPS shipping |
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If your product weights exceed the maximum UPS/USPS maximum weights, you now have the option of separating the product into split weights. The system will
sort the split weights in ascending order and "place" them into packages for UPS/USPS calculation purposes.
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| Product-specific affiliate commission rate |
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You can now set product-specific affiliate commission rates that will take precedence over individual affiliate commission rates. This provides greater
flexibility in setting affiliate commissions, allowing you to set lower/higher/zero commission rates for specific products.
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| Modify affiliate commission rate |
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You can now modify existing affiliate commission rates when viewing affiliate details.
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| Sitemap Generator |
Site maps serve two vital functions:
1. They help surfers navigate!
2. They encourage search engine spiders.
Our new sitemap generator feature allows you to generate a sitemap for your store.
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| New payment gateways |
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Propay, Yourpay, Cybersource, Wirecard, Moneris, and SECPay have been added as integrated payment gateways.
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| 2checkout product download |
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Using this feature, you can download your products in the appropriate format to be uploaded to 2checkout.com.
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| Improved whitespace compression for stylesheets and templates |
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Improved whitespace compression for stylesheets and templates to reduce file sizes, and thus increase loading speeds.
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| Additional product listing layout |
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An additional product listing page layout that you can customize your category page product listing looks with.
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| Shopping.com product download |
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You can now export your product details for use at Shopping.com quickly and easily. Just choose to download your product details and select from the available formats listed.
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| Minimum Normal Discount Quantity/Value |
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You can now set a minimum order quantity or value threshold that must be reached before the discount coupon can be applied.
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| Auto clean product images |
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You can now choose to have associated product images automatically deleted when deleting products manually/by batch/when deleting categories.
All unused product images (blowup, large, small) associated with the deleted products will be deleted when the products are deleted from your store.
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| Order Listing - Extra Search Filters |
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You can now filter your orders in the order listing by Product ID and IP Address. There are additional text input fields that allow you to enter a list of
Product IDs or a customer IP address to search for.
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