7cart eCommerce News

SP Richards eCommerce Integration

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 04:00:00 GMT

We are pleased to announce the integration of S.P. Richards’ new Enhanced E-Content with our 7cart eCommerce product. SP Richards’ dealers who need enhanced integration with SPR or who solely rely on traditional catalog sales can take advantage of the Enhanced E-Content to deliver a significantly improved online shopping and purchasing experience for their customers.

Blazing Fast Searches: In additional to the enhanced keyword search including multiple spellings and misspelling logic, product synonyms, and expanded common product terminology, our sophisticated search engine will ensure relevant and rapid responses to all of your customers product searches.
Guided Search: New category-specific product attributes enable online shoppers to filter search results by product attributes.
Browse by Manufacturer: Auto populated categories and navigation structure based on manufacturer data.
Enhanced Categorization: Improved organization, a new indexing structure, and clear, logical category labels provide more information and make it easier to locate products when browsing the online catalog.
Related and Similar Products: The Enhanced E-Content includes links to accessories and complementary items.
Larger Images: Customers can click to view larger imagery.
Product Comparison: Users can compare product attributes of selected items to help make the best purchase decision.
EDI and XML integration: Order, Inventory and Shipping information seamlessly flows to and from SPR.

About S.P. Richards
S.P. Richards Company, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Genuine Parts Company (GPC: NYSE), distributes a wide spectrum of business products to office products resellers throughout the U.S. and Canada. These products include consumable office supplies, office furniture, computer supplies, consumer electronics cleaning and breakroom supplies from all of the major industry manufacturers. S.P. Richards Company markets several proprietary brands under the names of Lorell, Integra, Sparco, Genuine Joe, Nature Saver, Compucessory, and Elite Image. The company operates 44 Distribution Centers in the United States and Canada, including HorizonUSA and S.P. Richards Canada.

7cart eCommerce Guided Search, Browse by Manufacturer and RSS

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 05:00:00 GMT

Our latest version has many enhancements, upgrades and updates... but we will only be going over our super useful Guided Search, Browse by Manufacturer, and Category RSS Feeds

Guided Search

Guided Search is a filter based navigation method that will automatically create a menu that will allow customers to filter the results by Price, Product Type Properties, Sub Categories and Manufacturers. What does that mean? Let's say you need to buy some power tools. Specifically a Power Drill. You would navigate using traditional category navigation to a general power tool page. Now your customer has the choice to filter their results by price, brand or other attributes.
(EXAMPLE OF GUIDED SEARCH)

Browse By Manufacturer

We have enhanced the manufacturer pages to work just like category pages. This will allow you to enter a long description, logos, banner, re-write url, etc. With this functionality, you will be able to quickly and easily create navigation top down for all of your Manufacturers. Before this, you would have to create categories for each Manufacturer! Of course all SEO friendly again.

Category RSS Feeds

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a great way to deliver content into the hands of potential website visitors. It is also a channel for syndicating your content onto others’ websites. And, of course, with that comes links—deep links into your latest products, best sellers, whatever your category has in it. Your RSS feeds are a conduit for reaching influential bloggers who, for whatever reason, have an interest in your site. In addition, your RSS feeds could be picked up by RSS search engines like Feedster, Technorati and Google Blog Search. Many bloggers subscribe to search results feeds from these search engines to keep up with what is happening on a particular topic or industry. Thus, if something featured in your RSS feeds include the keywords that the blogger is tracking with their RSS search results subscription, you will end up getting in front of that blogger even if he or she is not subscribing directly to your RSS feed. The RSS feed link appears on most of our standard Category Templates.

7cart Updates - New Reporting Capabilities

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 04:00:00 GMT

Export Capabilities
We have updated all reports to allow for an easy, one click, export of all of the data presented. In some cases we export even more data than what is shown.

New Report: Tax Report
You can now see all the taxed sales over a period of time. Our Tax administration section allows unlimited taxes to be configured and listed by Country, State/Region, County and Postal/Zip Code. Also, products on the store have the option of being assigned to a Tax Class. Tax Classes allow you to charge a specific amount of tax for each product in the store in addition to any normal sales tax.

7Cart Version Upgrade - 3.5

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 04:00:00 GMT

We are finalizing our newest version of 7cart and wanted to notify you of an upcoming upgrade. There is no need to worry; this upgrade will only require 1 - 2 minutes of downtime, if any at all.
We want to send a special thanks to our customers that have participated in beta testing and providing excellent feedback. Please take a minute and read some of the new stuff going on and expect many more exciting updates to come!

Design and Navigation
First of all, you will notice that the whole administration section has a new look... it is much cleaner to look at and hopefully you will like it as much as we do.

New Administrator Dashboard: At-a-glance views of your Sales and Top Products. View your most recent orders and click right into them. Also a "jump to order" function is available right under the Most Recent Orders block.

Navigation changed a little bit: we moved everything under "Specials and Offers" under "Marketing".

Order Manager Updates
The keyword search now searches for Products and Order Numbers in addition to the customer data.

No more having to recreate orders for customers. Just move an order out of the Shopping Cart report by first viewing the order, clicking the Payment button, then clicking the "Place Order" button.

Catalog Updates
Brand new category editor allows you to drag and drop, sort sub-categories by name, rename, hide, and more - using a context menu. Just right click on the category to see the options.

The edit category page has a new layout with a nice large description area.

Product Import and Export capability coming really soon!

Marketing
You now have an XML Sitemap Generator - A sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site. The sitemap has wide adoption, including support from Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.

Reports
Our entire reports section has been updated to include new filters, graphs and exporting capabilities. You can now export Sales by Date and Sales by Customer! Sales by Date now includes a New vs. Returning customer graph and sales by hour.

Security and Infrastructure Upgrades
7cart ecommerce is now ASP.NET 3.5 compliant putting our platform again on the cutting edge of the .NET environment.

As usual, we are consistently updating our infrastructure to be as safe as possible and thanks to our partner McAfee, we are tested every single day to ensure we are "hacker-safe". One update you might notice is that when an error occurs, you will no longer get the dreaded red lettering. We have created a custom error page for the solution, but we still log all errors within our system so that we can continue to troubleshoot as best as we can.