Smartstore 5 Release Highlights

The completely rewritten and redesigned Smartstore version 5 with all extensions is available.

Update 18.11.2022: With the maintenance release 5.0.1 further improvements have been added: Omnibus EU directive-compliant pricing is fully supported. In addition, there are great innovations in the area of price marketing for store operators.

More on the improvements with Release 5.0.1

Smartstore 5 is the fastest store system in the world and brings over 1,000   Improvements:

Advantages with which you score every day as a store operator! Bring your position, KPIs, search engine ranking, customer satisfaction, workflow effectiveness, and store sales to the top with Smartstore 5, without being limited by the limitless individualization of your store to make any sacrifices.

On the contrary! It has never been so easy to completely and individually align Smartstore 5 stores with your own business model and sales concept .

Get ready for top performance and unimagined flexibility!

We have catapulted Smartstore 5 far into the future by use of the latest Microsoft .NET technologies and consistent refactoring of the program code to catapult it far into the future. Compared to Smartstore 4, performance in all areas has increased by a factor of 5 to 10 .

Smartstore 5 Highlights:
Ready for Cloud
out of the box

Smartstore 5 is the fastest store system in the world

Compared to Smartstore 4, performance has accelerated by at least 5 times in all areas. With less than 100 milliseconds TTFB (time to first byte - the time until the website starts loading), Smartstore is the fastest E-commerce platform out-of-the-box. So it takes just a tenth of a second for the web server to send the first byte of the store page to the customer. Whether with a single store or dozens of Multishops on a Smartstore installation.

Faster implementation of projects is a big point, along with technical speed. Store operators also get practical speed benefits, for example, with fast data import and export at extreme speed with Smartstore 5.

Platform-independent and wide hosting selection

In addition to Windows, Smartstore 5 now supports hosting on Linux. As database servers, in addition to Microsoft SQL Server, the license-free open source database MySQL is now supported . Support for other databases such as   PostgreSQL   is planned.

Automated translation of all content

The new Translation Tool translates the entire store with just one click . What is translated? Product texts and Descriptions, product groups, menus, SEO metatags, CMS page builder stories, content sliders and other content. In addition, the Translation is automatically stored in the store, so it is not a one-time live translation. Here, the possibilities are not limited to the most common languages. Because with the combined knowledge of DeepL and Google Translator, websites can be easily translated into far more languages than ever before.

PayPal Checkout

The new PayPal Checkout allows payment via PayPal, direct debit, credit and debit card as well as payment on open account. In addition, for the first time, PayPal Checkout enables a variety of other local, country-specific payment methods that your Online Shop more attractive at home and abroad . Nowadays, customers place a high value on diverse options for Payment of their purchase. With PayPal Checkout, you can prevent shopping cart abandonment more easily and record more orders.

Advanced "Sign In With ..."

An important tool for store owners to convert visitors into registered customers is "External Authentication". In addition to the standard login via email and the already existing external login methods via Facebook, Twitter and Amazon Pay, three authentications have now been added with Smartstore 5 : LinkedIn, Microsoft and Google . The increased and flexible offering of these Login methods may lead to more customer registrations.

Database backups

New with Smartstore 5: Backups of the database can be conveniently and securely created and organized by the store administrator in the backend with just one click. Special additional software is not necessary. The administration offers functions for downloading, uploading, Restore and delete database backups. A handy addition to your backup strategy .

Flexible hosting

Cloud, hoster, or on premise self-hosted: You decide! With Smartstore 5 extremely easy and simple: Quickly deploy Smartstore locally, on a server, or in the cloud, regardless of the system environment.

As a platform-independent and Docker-enabled application, you can host Smartstore 5 on all popular cloud services, for example, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. This allows you to easily take advantage of the flexibility and security of the cloud . With the help of these services, it's possible to scale your store quickly and in ways you've never seen before.

Hosting with Docker

Use our new Docker images or simply create your own Docker image with one click directly from the source code. Docker is a particularly simple tool, supported out-of-the-box for the first time with Smartstore 5 .

With Docker, you can run Smartstore directly on a Docker-equipped server without triggering the installation of additional system requirements and configuring extra programs. Because Docker takes care of that.

WebP support and professional settings for image processing

Smartstore 5 supports Google's new bandwidth- and storage-saving image format "WebP" with around 30 percent file size savings . In addition, in Smartstore 5 you can set in great detail how store images are compressed and reduced in size for preview images. Technical drawings require different settings than furniture and textile photos. Work with the good presets or customize everything individually: Smartstore 5 gives you that freedom.

Advanced personalization

With Smartstore 5, store operators can personalize customers more easily and comprehensively than ever before. By Creating a successful customer journey in Smartstore you stand out from the crowd and thus improve your customer retention: Mega Search Plus, Personalized Product Recommendation, Product Advisor . This runs through hundreds of setting options that have been newly created and further enhanced for Smartstore 5.

Shop & Backend Facelift

The user interface in both the front-end and back-end has been revamped to keep up with the latest design trends with Smartstore 5. All this while further increasing usability, ease of use and retaining the learned Workflows .

A particular highlight is the new DataGrid, an in-house development by SmartStore exclusively for Smartstore 5. In principle, this is an Excel for all commerce data in the store. Store operators can find their way through all Data tables, for example for products.

The column order can also be changed as desired, and sorting data is also more efficient than ever before. In addition, the individually made changes to the DataGrid are saved.

100% legally secure

Smartstore 5 is also 100% legally secure due to pre-certification via TrustedShops. Even with upcoming changes in the legal situation on European level, the highest courts or the practice of data protection authorities. Our promise: We quickly provide you with updates technically adapted to these circumstances, within a few hours if necessary.

Improvements with the release 5.0.1

Update 18.11.2022: With the maintenance release 5.0.1 further improvements have been added: Omnibus EU directive-compliant pricing is fully supported. In addition, there are great innovations in the area of Price Marketing for store operators. And more! Read more about the individual innovations now!

EU Omnibus Directive Compatible

Compliance with European Union Omnibus Directive . With   Product reviews from store customers, you as Store operator can now use a "verified purchase" label to be displayed. Furthermore,   you can now enrich your crossed-out comparison prices, a standard feature that has been available for a long time, with the note "Lowest price" or "Lowest current price" .

New price marketing opportunities

Promote more actively by adding   discount badges, e.g. "Deal", "Limited Offer", "Black Friday", etc. Adding to your price offer.

Countdown for special offers

Present limited time offers where the advantage price automatically ends after a certain time and visually counts down dynamically , converting site visitors into buyers. New in the standard for all store owners with release 5.0.1 is the countdown for Offers. You are completely free as far as the countdown is concerned: Days, hours... A valuable marketing tool!

Massive improvements in price presentation

With 5.0.1 comes many new setting options for the product price, which on the one hand became necessary by law, and on the other hand bring new Sales opportunities bring: You can now always display the default price,   Offer price the regular price can be replaced. You can also present the savings to the standard price to your store customers in an inspiring way.

Barcodes, QR codes and GiroCode

More and more consumers scan codes with their cell phones, gaining access to services and information, now also for Smartstore 5.0.1. As of this release, there is a complete framework for barcodes/QR codes. Developers can use it for pioneering services.

One example is the new "GiroCode" plugin (available on request) for Smartstore 5.0.1, which e.g. supports good old prepayment with QR code. Customers can scan the code, no need to transmit the IBAN etc., all payment data is in the scanned code, the customers can thus pay the prepayment directly via their banking app or mobile payment method - without additional fees.

All store owners will find in the admin area a simple Bar and QR code generator. This free tool is available from Community Edition 5.0.1 available.

MediaManager with metadata

The MediaManager (available on request) as integrated image, video and document management can now be additional Metadata of photos, for example, to the photographer or the camera. This facilitates the work for large Product image collections. IPTC and EXIF are supported. MediaManager users can now add internal admin comments to any media deposit.

PayPal innovations

PayPal has developed a lot in 2022. These much sought-after innovations, especially PayPal Checkout, reflects the free PayPal plugin for Smartstore 5.0.1. In detail is now also a Installment -Widget added, the Payment method Purchase on account or "Pay per invoice" has been added.

If you are a new store operator with PayPal, you will benefit from the strong simplifiedPayPal Onboarding. It is now enough to simply log in with PayPal credentials to set up PayPal for Smartstore. It is no longer necessary to create an app on the PayPal developer site, as was previously the case.

Performance

Smartstore remains the fastest store system worldwide with only a tenth of a second reaction to Customer clicks and customer searches in extremely high numbers. Further optimizations were made, result is improved Startup speed and saved 100 MB memory after launching Smartstore 5.0.1.

The complete release notes for Smartstore 5.0.1 read in english language on our Github, here you can you can also download Smartstore Community Edition for your server operating system.   https://github.com/smartstore/Smartstore/releases/tag/5.0.1

How to get Smartstore 5

Smartstore 5 is available in different editions and manufacturer support .

For store operators we recommend the Premium Flat . Here you get for a monthly fee the store software with expert telephone support and update service, the intelligent store search MegaSearch Plus is also included in the flat rate.

Do you have more questions about Smartstore 5? Give us a call or send us an email.
We will be happy to advise you personally!

Your Smartstore Team

Email: info@smartstore.com
Fon: +49 (0)231-5335-0
SmartStore AG
Kaiserstraße 63-65
44135 Dortmund