As many of you will have noticed, we launched the long awaited ShopBuilder about a month ago and as promised we're going to have a continuous stream of new shop features coming as quickly as we can bake them in the Moonfruit oven. (We don't really bake our software, but you get the idea).

We've had a great response to the shop launch with over 45,000 shops having been built in the last month. And we've also had a lot of feedback from you about the additional features you'd like us to build as quickly as possible. We love the feedback, so keep it coming.

So first out of the oven is the new Category feature. Many of you were asking for it, so here it is.

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Shop homepage with Category links

Categories allow you to create groupings for your products and have different ways of ordering and arranging them to suit the different audiences you may be addressing or targeting. In the shop manager you can now add categories and assign products to categories. One product can be in more than one category and the list order of products in each category can be different.

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Category editor

Categories have their own URL so you can link directly to a category sub heading. We've also created a new link type on the link tab in the Editor so that any image or link can link to a category allowing you to construct your own navigation. You can add category links direct from the menu of your site too, so that your normal site menu can offer different category pages.

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Link editor with new category link type

And if that wasn't enough, there is also a new category link widget in the File Manager which automatically creates a list of all your categories and links to each of them. You can customise the style of this category link widget and change the button style, font and colours.

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Category list widget on right

The mobile and Facebook views have also been updated to incorporate the category view. So if you have more than two categories, your Facebook shop will show the category names and images, which link through to the category product lists. And on the mobile view you can navigate to the category types from the drop down at the top of the page.

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Facebook shop with categories

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Mobile shop with categories

So that's about it for now. All these images are taken from our shopdemo.moonfruit.com website, so feel free to have a look and a play there.


So what's next?

We're working on some improvements to the shipping options and the ability to change the quantities of items on the checkout page - so your customers can buy multiple numbers of an item more easily. These should be out before the end of the year (testing permitting). Then early next year we will bring out product variants, and after that basic stock control and discount/coupon options. After that? Well, some more stuff - helped by the feedback we get from you guys.