Since October last year the ShopBuilder has gone from strength to strength and our customers have now built over 135,000 shops. There are already 168,552 products on sale. As Leila mentioned in an earlier blog we have been taking your recommendations on board for which features you'd like to see next and Product Variants (Options) came top of the list. Thanks to your feedback, today we pushed out an update that now allows you to apply variations to all your products e.g colour, range, size etc.
Variants
To update your shop to use variants, you need to use the update tab on the Editor for each ShopBuilder section. If you've not done this before it's very straightforward. Go to your shop page whilst logged in, click the shop on the page so it's highlighted and then go to the Editor. Click on the Update tab and click on the Update widget button. And then Save your page. You'll need to do this for the four sections (Product Catalog, Product Detail, Shopping Cart and Sale Confirmation) which you can work through using the drop down on the toolbar.
Getting the new updates is easy
Adding variations is also very easy. Go to your Product List on the Shop section and edit that product. You will now see a section in the middle called Product Options which allows you set up product options or variations up to a maximum of 50 per product.
How you set up variants within the Editor
So not only does this give you more flexibility over the products you sell, allow you to add one base product and offer a range of variations, but it also means, for example, that if you run a Standard account you can run a shop that offers up to 2500 different items or units for sale (50 products x 50 variations).
How your customers will see variants in action on your website
As with other features of the ShopBuilder, Product Variations will also appear on your Mobile Shop and your Facebook Shop (where they've been set up correctly).
Bonus
Now, for the eagle-eyed amongst you, who spotted the bonus feature?
We managed to sneak in Duplicate a Product to the release. This will make it easier for our shop builders to easily copy a product which you can then modify or adapt as you see fit on your Product List. Using the Edit drop-down for each product you can quickly copy a product into your Product List.
Duplicating an existing product is now very simple
So, what's next?
Well, the next release is very exciting and will see our first version of the mobile editor going out the door. The editor will give you access to mobile version styling (colours) and include/exclude content from the mobile version. For those of you who consider mobile technology to be a key channel to visitors accessing your sites, this tool will give you more control. Obviously the HTML5 work will provide even greater benefits but that won't hit the streets until Q3.
So, what's next for the shop? We've had some great feedback from our customers and we now wish to find out what the next most important feature is for you to have added to the ShopBuilder. We have selected the next top 3 requested features that we keep hearing again and again, but we'd like to get more specific feedback on what we build next. So if you want to have your say on what shop feature you'd like to see developed next please cast your vote in our quick and simple survey. So, over to you.
Lastly, what we have fixed!
We fixed a number of bugs in this release, many of which were minor. The headline bug fixes were:
- Google Webmaster Tools verification code is again being added to the HTML
- You can now scroll again in edit mode across all supported browsers
- Facebook Shop image popup gallery is now working correctly again
And that's another release.
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