Interspire Shopping Cart 3.1 Released

Introduction

After a whirlwind release of Interspire Shopping Cart 3.0, I'm proud to announce that we've just pushed the 3.1 release live. We've been working closely with our hundreds of existing Interspire Shopping Cart customers to implement requested features as quickly as we can.

New features

The features included in Interspire Shopping Cart 3.1 are shown below:

• Complete multi-currency support (with realtime conversion rates from WebserviceX)
   
  
• Multiple new payment providers, including LinkPoint, YourPay, BPay and eSelect Plus
   
  
• Affiliate conversion tracking for any 3rd party affiliate system
   
  
• Bulk import and assignment of order tracking numbers
   
  
• A new support tab in the control panel for quick access to support
   
  
• Ability to hide product pricing and also show a custom "call for pricing" message instead
   
  
• Customer groups with category/product/fallback discounts and access levels

New store designs

The store designs shown below were released along with version 3.1 and can be downloaded from the Download Store Designs tab on the Store Design page in your store's control panel.

Baby:



Beauty (Pink):



Beauty (Turquoise):



Toys:



Version 3.1 changelog

The condensed changelog for 3.1 is shown below. You can find the full changelog in the changelog.txt file in the zip file from our client area.

- Added the shipping and tax costs to the side mini cart page shown for "You Might Also Like.." cart suggestions
- Added the ability to disallow purchasing for a product on a product level
- Added the ability to specify a "Call for Pricing" label if the prices for a product are being hidden
- Added the ability to integrate third party affiliate systems in to the store from the Settings > Affiliate Settings page
- Added new 'Support' tab in to the Control Panel which links to the knowledge base, forums and client area
- Added new 'LinkPoint Connect' payment module
- Added new 'eSelect Plus' payment module
- Added the ability to import tracking numbers for orders from a CSV file
- Added the ability to create multiple store currencies and have them automatically updated from WebServiceX
- Added automatic detection for the visitors currency based on the location of their IP address if a matching currency is found in the store
- Added the ability for customers to change the select currency on the product pages to view all prices in another currency
- Added new credit card types (Australian Bank Card, Maestro, Solo and Switch) to the Credit Card (Manual) payment provider
- Added the ability for credit card types to require an issue date and issue number when purchasing (for Solo based cards)
- Added a new order transactions table to log each transaction performed for an order (used by PayPal and Google Checkout modules)
- Rewrote PayPal payment module to use Instant Payment Notification instead of PDT so that customers don't need to return to the store after payment and eChecks are correctly supported
- Added the list of categories a product is in to the product CSV export
- Added the ability when importing products to have them placed in to multiple categories by specifying them with a semi-colon (;)
- Added the ability to specify a different page title from your store name for the index page of your store (for SEO purposes)
- Added an internal data cache to cache commonly accessed items (currencies, category lists, page lists etc) to almost halve the number of queries per page in most places
- Changed the Australia Post and FedEx shipping modules to only fetch the international shipping quotes for international addresses and only national quotes for national addresses
- Added a new 403 page template to each of the templates that is shown when you don't have permission to view a particular page
- Added the ability to CC order invoices to multiple email addresses from the control panel
- Added the ability to specify custom SMTP servers for sending email messages from the store
- Move the "Recent Orders" chart on the home page of the control panel to the top of the page
- Moved 'Categories' menu to under the 'Products' menu
- Added the date an order was shipped to the expanded order view in the control panel
- Changed the background colors for the status messages in the control panel so there is a better visual indicator between them (red messages shown for errors)
- Changed credit card (manual) payment method to show the next 10 years instead of 5 for those card types that have a longer lifetime
- Added 4 new templates: Baby, Beauty (2 colour schemes), Toys, and Furniture
- Added new customer groups functionality allowing customers to be assigned to different groups to receive store wide, category level or product level discounts
- Added the ability to restrict customer groups to only being allowed to view certain categories in the store
- Changed the Froogle (Google Base) product export feeds to have an expiry time of 30 days from the export for the products
- Changed the timeout of the Austrailia Post real time shipping module to be 10 seconds instead of 60
- Changed the GetCountryList function to internally cache the result to save around 9 queries on the "View Cart" page when certain shipping providers were enabled
- Added "Save and Exit" as well as "Save and Add Another" buttons to the "Create New Page" page
- Changed the behavior of the state field on the registration and shipping address pages so that when a state text box was shown, the state is no longer required
- Changed the method that unique visitors are tracked with to only count each visitor once in a 24 hour period
- Changed the method that the 2Checkout payment module uses to pass order information to now include the individual items in an order
- Changed the method that the 2Checkout payment module uses to pass order information to now include details about the purchasing customer

We're powering along and version 3.2 is already well under development. We will be posting features coming in version 3.2 later in the week. For now, existing customers can download the 3.1 release from our client area. If you have any questions please contact us and we'll be more than happy to help.