Besides bugfixes, many new features have been added. Features like the "Wallet" (credit account) , the new template Engine based on Liquid , the responsive backend , the revamped Amazon Pay and also the Implementation of RTL (right-to-left languages) will delight store owners and developers.
The most important innovations in detail:
Wallet (credit account) - commercial plugin
The new Wallet system allows store customers to purchase by credit. The customer can top up his wallet at any time with any amount and redeem it when shopping. If the credit is not sufficient, the remaining amount can be paid using another payment method. As a store operator, you can also top up customer wallets, for example, to make it easier to process returns; Or you can simply transfer your Customer simply a small birthday gift.
The wallet system is thus a perfect customer loyalty tool that offers a variety of uses and generates plenty of benefits :
- The value for returned goods does not have to be paid out, so the revenue stays in-house.
- You provide your employees with tax-advantaged non-cash benefits in the form of monthly wallet top-ups, which in turn are spent in the in-house store.
- Thanks to the REST api, integrators can establish POS systems to speed up stationary and cashless sales during an event or trade show
- and much more.
"Liquid" Template Engine
In the future, the brand-new template engine based on Liquid will take care of the processing of e-mail templates and newsletters. In the backend you design your e-mails in the specially created Liquid editor (with auto-completion and syntax highlighting). In addition, thanks to CSS inlining with the help of PreMailer.NET, their e-mails can henceforth be displayed absolutely correctly by any e-mail program, no matter how exotic.
https://shopify.github.io/liquid/
https://github.com/milkshakesoftware/PreMailer.Net
Cash Rounding
Set rounding rules for each currency and specify which payment types to apply them with. For example, you can specify that Swiss francs should always be rounded to 0.05 centimes (denominator). Denominators and rules (thresholds at which to round up or down) are freely configurable. You can also specify whether item amounts or only final amounts should be rounded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_rounding
https://debitoor.com/encyclopedia/rounds
RTL (right-to-left languages)
SmartStore now offers comprehensive support for left-to-left languages such as Arabic or Hebrew. This doesn't just change the text direction, but mirrors the whole layout perfectly; Both in the store and in the backend! And thanks to sophisticated Bidi support, your store can display multiple languages simultaneously while realigning text direction inline (e.g. for single right-handed passages in an otherwise left-handed document).
Language Packs
By the end of Q2 2018, we plan to offer a total of 13 language packs - created by native-speaker expert translators - free of charge. You can already use these starting with the Community Edition. The new language package importer lists all packages compatible with your program version in the backend and enables a simple OneClick online installation.
The following language packages are planned or already completed (in bold): German , English , French , Italian, Portuguese, Dutch/Belgian , Russian , Polish, Spanish , Arabic, Turkish, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese .
Amazon Pay
Amazon Pay allows millions of customers to pay your online store using the address and payment information from their Amazon customer account . We have heavily revised and extended the plugin according to Amazon best practices and current specifications, including the new login functions.
(Performance) Faster image processing
From now on, thumbnails are generated delayed and asynchronously, which leads to a significant increase in the perceived speed of page loading, and not least is particularly rewarded by search engines. Because from version 3.1 onwards, thumbnails - if not already done - are only generated when they are requested by the browser.
TinyImage - commercial plugin exclusively from Premium Edition
TinyImage achieves highest compression rates for your uploaded images as well as generated thumbnails and also offers WebP support. Up to 80% additional file size savings are possible. Search engines will surely like that and mobile store visitors even more . In our experience, media files take up by far the most storage space in a store. TinyImage will make sure that you don't exhaust your hosting limits so quickly and can even save you cash, as significantly less data needs to be transferred.
Address formatting by destination country
Many countries define their own rules for address formatting. Thanks to the new Liquid Template Engine, country-specific address formats can now be stored very easily.
Read the full release notes here
https://github.com/smartstoreag/SmartStoreNET/releases/tag/3.1.0