AmeriCommerce is always developing new features, tools and platform updates. Every now and again we like to do a roundup of activities, updates, integrations and new features
to keep everyone up to speed on our progress.
We are very excited to announce that as of the 2014.2 release, AmeriCommerce customers have the following:
New Features
Everyone loves new features, they are what separate the mundane from the
exceptional. Checkout the great new features available in AmeriCommerce:
- Q&A
Feature
- No
matter what you sell, your customers are always going to have questions. Store
owners can now add a questions and answers widget to any page in their
store that allows customers to ask questions and receive answers from the
store owner, admin users or other shoppers.
- Live Design - The
new version of
Live Design has a streamlined set of tools for improved point-and-click page editing in Live Design mode as well as more options for editing widgets and applying common style change options for clearing server-side cache. Easily make changes to your store in real-time!
- Theme
Settings
- With this, any AmeriCommerce REV Theme has specific settings available for users to modify unique aspects of their site. Easily add a logo, change background images, fonts and colors and other common style elements.
- Mailing
List Widget Enhancements
– The mailing list widget now supports multiple mailing lists and the ability to specifically assign which email list widget is for which mailing list, rather than always associating it to the default list for the store.
- New Import / Export Tools for Product Variant Group, Attributes, Attribute Groups and Manufacturers have been added to the ever expanding list
of things you can import or export.
New Responsive Themes and an All New Theme Store
A professional theme gives your
shoppers the confidence and encouragement to shop with you. We have an amazing new
Base Theme freely available to AmeriCommerce customers for building responsive themes on our REV Theme Engine. With the REV Theme Engine and the Base Theme, we are proud to announce over a dozen great new themes are now available for AmeriCommerce store owners.
Along with new themes, AmeriCommerce now has a theme store for selecting both free and paid themes. Using the new theme settings, designers can now create custom settings for their themes. This makes for extremely customizable themes that feature a high level of functionality right out of the box. For store owners, this means more great themes to choose from and for front-end developers, designers and web agencies, this means a great opportunity to create and sell responsive themes to any of our more than 5,000 active stores on the AmeriCommerce platform.
New Integrations
More integration means much more options and functionality. We are always
proactively researching and integrating with software that we think can bring
something to the table and make the eCommerce shopping experience better for
both the store owner and shopper. Here are the latest integrations available in conjunction with AmeriCommerce. See the complete list of
AmeriCommerce Apps & Add-Ons.
- Yotpo - To generate reviews for your store and products!
- Efulfillment Service - Warehouse and fulfillment services.
- Mail Chimp - Build and manage your email lists!
- ShipStation - Streamline your order fulfillment process.
- PayPal Bill Me Later - Add finance options to your store so customers can buy now and pay later!
- 10 Yahoo Apps - A great selection of apps from Yahoo including: Bing Shopping, Live Web Insights, Google Shopping, Yahoo Stream Ads, Amazon Ads, Retargeting, Facebook Ads, Facebook Live Store, Live Sales, and Product Feeds.
Speed Improvements
In the world of
eCommerce, speed is everything, faster page load times lead to much higher
visitor engagement, retention, and even conversions. These are just a few of the tremendous advantages to your site
being smoking fast. The bottom line is, the faster the site, the higher the
sales. Now that you know
what speed improvements can do for you as an eCommerce entrepreneur, let’s highlight
the key performance enhancements.
- Optimization of widgets and merge codes.
- Reduced hits on the database.
- Sharing common data across all users.
- Optimization of home, product, category, manufacturer,
search, cart and checkout pages.
- Virtualized private cloud for massive resource
bursting.
- 50-300% reduction in time to send
content from server.
- Can now handle 50-100 times more
concurrent requests / people hitting the site at exactly the same time.
- Can now serve 10-50 times more
pages per second.
- 25-60% smaller downloads due to
compression and minification efforts.
These are just a few of the performance improvements.
For all the details about the speed and performance enhancements click here.
What Do You Need to Do?
Our staged rollout process means your store may not have these features for several more weeks. If you can’t wait, let us know at support.americommerce.com.
As always, changes to your specific themes are not automated in these updates. The new layouts offered in this release are available on fresh downloads from the theme
repository or you can manual review the theme pages and manually place the
updates in your existing theme.