With 9.3 we continue the theme, and extend it into “conversions”. This release is predominantly about providing ways in which online sellers can make it increasingly likely that their visitors will result in a sale.

New! Promotions Engine

A stunning, sophisticated rules based promo engine allows such combinations as “When any of my shoppers buy product a, then give them x% off product b” or “When a shopper who has spent >$x since mm-dd-yy now places an order for anything in category z, give them free shipping” and on, and on . . . . – discounts, free gifts, shipping rates. Run as many promos as you like and set their relative over-rides. Use promo codes, or set “active, even without a code”.

New! Mobile commerce, embedded and free

Now uses jquery. Kits are also enabled. Payment methods can be turned on/off.

Admin Features

Messages entered in the AdminAlert.Message AppConfig will now be displayed at the top of the site.

The Excel import format has been improved:

• The list of required fields is modified to reflect all current version changes
• Deprecated fields have been removed (pack references, track inventory by size, etc)
• (New!) Added support for the Condition attribute on variants

Importing products through Excel will no longer result in duplicate entities on stores with multiple locales.

Orders imported through the shipping import tool will now have the Carrier set to the user’s value, rather than defaulting to UPS.

(New!)Products can now be mapped to unpublished categories in the admin console, so admins can get new additions fully set up before publishing anything.

New entities will now display immediately in the entity grid in the admin console, rather than requiring a page reload.

The Customer Email report is no longer restricted to super admins only. Regular admins can run that report as well.

All of the filters on the Bulk Update Pricing page are now fully functional.

The Mailing Manager page no longer requires at least 2 recipients for emails.

Running Monthly Maintenance will now clear the Profile table regardless of the store’s locale. The Profile functionality has also been improved so the Profile table has controlled growth.

(New!) When a product or variant is cloned, the new copy is set to unpublished so store admins can make whatever adjustments are necessary before it appears on the site.

All realtime shipping rate orders will now properly honor the RTShipping.CallForShippingPrompt AppConfig for orders that exceed carriers’ maximum weights.

Clicking on the Products tab while editing an entity will only display products mapped to that entity by default.

Integer-typed AppConfigs now accept negative values.

(New!) Customers can now be manually assigned to specific stores through the admin console.

The ShippingHandlingExtraFee AppConfig will now honor decimal values ($#.## instead of requiring whole numbers as before)

The ApplyShippingHandlingExtraFeeToFreeShipping AppConfig has been deprecated, and will be removed in the next release.

The Telerik controls that ship with the software for use in the admin console have been updated to the latest version.

Customers that had previously unsubscribed from a store’s newsletter can now re-subscribe.

Improved the navigation for managing polls in the admin console.

Admins are no longer prevented from editing kits when FilterProductsByCustomerLevel is enabled.

Anonymous customers will no longer be sent a welcome email after placing their first order.

Store owners moving up from 8.0.1.2 will have no more problems with computing taxes by zip code.

The ShowCartDeleteItemButton AppConfig has been deprecated.

(New!) Product images can now be named by SEName instead of productID, using the new NameImagesBySEName AppConfig.

(New!) Countries and states can now be hidden on the front end by marking them as unpublished in the admin console, rather than having to delete them.

Text that was previously set in source code is now editable/translatable through string resources.

Clarified the descriptions on several AppConfigs.

Improved the performance of the 'Re-send Distributor Email' button on the View/Manage Orders page.

When creating a new quantity discount table, the correct number of initial rows will be added based on the admin’s selection.

Significantly increased the level of flexibility through increasing the use of string resources.

User Interface

MiniCartMaxIconHeight and MiniCartMaxIconWidth AppConfigs will now be honored in the AJAX Minicart.

The bestsellers page honors inventory levels, customer level mappings, store mappings, etc.

Sitemap2.aspx now honors admin-defined display order on entities and products.

Text used by the newsletter signup control can now be edited or translated into other languages.

(New!) Kits now support upsell products.

The OnSaleForTextColor AppConfig will now be honored.

The number of items in the cart generated by the NUM_CART_ITEMS skin token will now update with each page load, rather than being one refresh behind.

Deleted sub entities will no longer appear in navigational menus on the front end of the site.

Fixed some HTML used with Call To Order products that was causing display issues in IE.

Improved validation and messages - regarding the new passwords created through SmartOPC.

The AJAX minicart no longer displays tax or total lines, and the subtotal does not include tax.

Customers can no longer enter negative quantities for items on the shopping cart page.

The Previous, Up, and Next navigation links on product pages now honor store mappings.

Kit products will now use extended prices if they are set up on the product’s variant.

Customers can no longer bypass a product’s minimum quantity setting by changing the quantity on the shopping cart page.

We have added additional IDs and classes to addtocart forms for easier styling.

(New!) Enabling DisallowShippingToPOBoxes now allows billing addresses to still contain PO Boxes.

Payments

Failed transactions placed through the Sage Payments gateway now properly record the TransactionCommand and TransactionResult so they can be viewed in the Failed Transactions list.

(New!) Added support for the ‘VBV’ skin token. Sites using the Cardinal Commerce Centinel service for 3dsecure can add this token to their skin to display a Verified by Visa/MasterCard SecureCode logo.

Changing Authorize.net CIM credentials will no longer cause errors for customers who initially checked out under the first Authorize.net account.

CAVV processing is improved when using the Moneris payment gateway.

GoogleCheckout.AuthenticateCallback AppConfig now works as expected.

(New!) Added support for the Authorize.net CIM payment method in phone orders.

Authorize.net CIM can now properly be set to sandbox mode. Note that the gateway account being used for testing must still be in live mode.

SmartOPC now honors the ‘published’ field for countries and states.

Zero-dollar orders are fully honored in SmartOPC.

Failed Authorize.net CIM orders will display more meaningful error messages to customers so they can fix their submissions.

A customer checking out through Authorize.net CIM can no longer trigger zero-dollar transactions in the Authorize.net account.

(New!) Added support for PayPal Payments Advanced Checkout. This new solution from PayPal means that you can keep your customers on your site for the entire checkout process without taking on all of the burden of protecting their financial data. In addition to a merchant account and gateway in one, PayPal provides you with a secure checkout template fully integrated within your AspDotNetStorefront store so your customers won't know that the payment is actually being processed behind the scenes.

The SecureNetV4 payment gateway is fully supported in both live and test mode.

Improved handling of customer information returned from PayPal to better manage addresses with empty phone numbers.

(New!) Added support for the 1stPay payment gateway.

Corrected an issue that could result in gateway calls including 3dsecure details when not appropriate.

(New!) Admin users can now filter orders by Google Checkout & Checkout by Amazon on the View/Manage Orders page.

The GoogleCheckout.DefaultShippingMarkup is now defaulted to 1.

‘Hidden by Amazon’ addresses left by abandoned Checkout By Amazon orders are automatically cleaned up, so they cannot be used to check out.

Smart One Page Checkout now supports customers changing display currencies.

The ‘Edit Order’ button will no longer display in the admin console for orders placed through Checkout by Amazon.

Inventory Management

(New!) Store admins can now configure the storefront to send them an email when product inventory levels sink below a configurable level. The list of products below that inventory level can also be displayed on the admin home page.

Products can now be hidden based on customer levels and inventory levels on a per-store basis. For example, store 1 could hide products below a stock level of 5, while store 2 could hide them only if they go below a stock of one, or not hide them at all.

Viewing a product in an entity with all products at negative inventory levels will no longer cause an error.

PageNotFound.aspx can be configured to not display out of stock products.

International Issues

Australia Post will now function properly out of the box.

Text on the adjust order total window in the admin console can now be translated to other languages.

The RSS feeds on the admin home page will display dates in the correct formats based on the store’s default locale.

When the sizes/colors that are available on a variant are changed, the software will now ‘clean up’ old rows in the Inventory table for options that were removed.

The create script now pre-loads many countries that were left out previously.

VAT tax is calculated correctly on price after Promotion discounts are applied.

Sales Tax

(New!) Avalara are demanding and diligent about the appliance of quality standards in any sales tax integration. Our MSx 9.3 certification (we are "Certified for AvaTax") indicates that our solution is fully integrated into their sales tax platform and has complete testing, meeting all the Avalara standards for certification.

(New!) Avalara connection credentials can now be tested from within the admin console.

(New!) Avalara now uses the customer level name as the tax exemption code if a customer is in a tax exempt level.

(New!) The Avalara plugin will now set the Tax Date to the original order date when issuing refunds.

(New!) The Avalara plugin now uses product name for the Item Description for each line item.

The Avalara.DetailLevel AppConfig has been deprecated.

(New!) AvaTax integration tax commits can now be disabled with the AvalaraTax.CommitTaxes & AvalaraTax.CommitRefunds AppConfigs.

MultiStore

Poll -> Store mappings made when adding or editing a new poll will now be saved.

All emails sent through the admin console are now store-aware.

Filtering products by customer level & inventory will now honor store-specific AppConfigs.

Other

Googletopics.aspx now creates product URLs correctly for stores running in virtual directories, and also honors store mappings.

Fixed a broken image link in the ordernotfound topic.

Added the topic "SubscriptionToken.Subscribe" that is referenced in code but not created in previous create or update scripts.

Fixed the aspdnsf_ProductInfo and aspdnsf_GetProducts stored procedures to properly handle the DisplayOutOfStockProducts AppConfig.