Many products have “attributes“. For example if you sell shoes they might be available in different sizes and different colors.
In coping with attributes, one approach would be to create a separate product code for each possible product option - but you would soon find you are dealing with a huge database of products!
So for that reason you have always been able to add a field for attributes with your Web-store-buddy “buy now” buttons (typically a drop down list). Like so:
However, with only one drop down list to work with, this method gets awkward if you have multiple sets of attributes. For example supposing you had lots of size variations and lots of color variations! You could try adding them to one list like this:
This approach is fine with just a few product options. But when you have lots of options (and lots of different types of options), it gets out of hand.
So to solve this problem we’ve upgraded the Web-store-buddy attributes feature so that you can now add up to five separate attribute lists to a buy now button. Here is the example above using the new method and two attribute lists.
With Web-store-buddy you can add add a field for custom text with a “buy now” button. This field needs to be named “optiontext“.
Previously the field was limited to 100 characters - but that has now been increased to 200 characters.
And whereas before you were restricted to a single line text field, now you can use a <textarea> field so that the shopper can enter more than one line. E.g.:
<textarea name=”optiontext” cols=”50″ rows=”3″></textarea>
We have just added a new feature that allows you to issue a discount coupon. When someone shops at your web site with the correct coupon code, you can configure Web-store-buddy to give the shopper either a fixed amount off their order, or a percentage discount.
We have just added support for the Maltese Lira currency (Lm) to the web-store-buddy shopping cart
Our ‘buddy’ applications are hosted in the States, designed in the UK, and used by folks around the world. That’s the Internet for you - but one of the tricky things to cope with is alternative spellings.
Mike looks after the web site for Marshall’s Nursery in Australia and he is using web-store-buddy for online orders. But he has noticed that with the cheque payment option web-store-buddy is displaying the US version of the word - ‘check‘.
After doing a little research we think it’s safe to say that ‘cheque’ is correct for all English speaking countries except for the States. So that’s how we’ve now set it up: With the web-store-buddy shopping cart and the the web-form-buddy payment processor, US customer pages and US merchant pages will display ‘check payment’; in all other cases the spelling will be ‘cheque payment’.
With Web-Store-Buddy your customer receives a detailed (and configurable) order confirmation email.
However Karen at www.musical-designs.com noticed that if a store uses PayPal or WorldPay to take the payment, the description on those sites (and on their emails) just says ‘goods’. Could that be changed for something more informative and descriptive?
Well now it sure can! Just select the option “store text configuration” from your control panel and there is now a box to enter the text that will appear at PayPal or Worldpay.
We have now added support for the Australian Bank Card to web-store-buddy (web-form-buddy payment forms already have this).
Not a year goes by it seems without new countries being added to the European Union. With the start of 2007 the number of EU countries increased form 25 to 27 with the addition of Bulgaria and Romania.
If you’re in the EU this may affect how your store needs to charge sales tax (VAT) for these countries. So we are pleased to announce that we have updated web-store-buddy to cope with the EU enlargement.
This is now the full list of EU countries:
AT ~ Austria
BE ~ Belgium
BG ~ Bulgaria
CY ~ Cyprus
CZ ~ Czech Republic
DE ~ Germany
DK ~ Denmark
EE ~ Estonia
ES ~ Spain
FI ~ Finland
FR ~ France
GB ~ United Kingdom
GR ~ Greece
HU ~ Hungary
IE ~ Ireland
IT ~ Italy
LT ~ Lithuania
LU ~ Luxembourg
LV ~ Latvia
MT ~ Malta
NL ~ Netherlands
PL ~ Poland
PT ~ Portugal
RO ~ Romania
SE ~ Sweden
SI ~ Slovenia
SK ~ Slovakia
Previously If you chose to charge a percentage rate for shipping with web-store-buddy you could only choose a whole number (eg 5%, 10%, 15%). Now it’s possible to specify a percentage rate to one decimal place precision. Cool! eg 5.7%, 6.9% etc.
(Thanks to Diane at yellowbarnweb.com for the suggestion)
The link to the contacts library is now included on the control panel home page to make it easier to find