Hello all,
We are happy to announce that the Sitefinity Ecommerce Early Preview Release for Sitefinity 4.x is now available. It can be downloaded from your Client.Net accounts, under the Beta downloads (link). The purpose of the preview release is to show the new Ecommerce module and the process for creating your online store. This release is intended for showing a preview, testing and evaluation and not intended to be used in a production environment. It is also a reduced set of features intended for a preview release - a lot more features are coming soon. Documentation about the module can be found here - http://www.sitefinity.com/documentation/ecommerce.aspx
Release Notes
Introducing the Ecommerce module
There is a new Ecommerce menu in Sitefinity allowing the merchant to configure their online store by adding products and configuring store settings such as shipping and payment processors. The E-commerce menu also allows the merchant to see Customers and Order Information.
Setting up your online store
Your online store can easily be setup and operational by creating Sitefinity content pages and dropping on the appropriate E-commerce widget, styling and setting properties. The widgets can be linked to each other via page properties.
General
- Create pages and drag/drop widgets for e-commerce functionality
- All widgets are templated and can be styled
- Multilingual and currency support
- Product Listing/Product Detail
- View all products or a single product
- View selected products(all, some, or matching filter) on a page
- Configure the product listing by paging and sorting
- Product Images can be uploaded and re-sized to show throughout the online store
- Display product information such as title, description, sku, weight and images
Shopping Cart
- Displays line items in the shopping cart
- Change quantity
- Remove items from the shopping cart
Checkout
- Multiple page checkout
- Collect customers shipping and billing addresses
- Collect payment information
- Transparent payment processing through Authorize.NET AIM
- Receipt
Product Catalog Management
- Create products in the catalog management area.
Products
- Create products with titles, description, weight, sku, taxable
- Upload and resize images (primary and alternate images)
Order Management
The order management area allows the merchant to view customers and orders. Each order shows details of products purchased, shipping and billing address. The merchant can define shipping methods or can set up a Real-time Shipping Rate provider as well as set up a payment processor to process transaction in real-time.
Customers
- View all customers
- View all orders for one customer
- (order status, amount, date)
Orders
- View all orders (order number, order status, subtotal, date)
- View one order (billing and shipping address, line items, shipping method)
Shipping Methods
- Configure “off-line” shipping methods based on country, area, state, range of weights, prices, quantity or a fixed rate per order or fixed percentage of the order total
- Configure FedEx Real-time rates
- Designate FedEx Shipping Services
- Payment Methods
- Configure Authorize.Net AIM and select credit cards for processing.
Taxes
- Configure sales tax for US and Canada and VAT for other countries based on billing or shipping address
- Set products to be taxable or non-taxable
Store Settings
- Create default settings for currency, country, unit of mass & length,shipping from country, shipping from zip
Coming Soon
The first release of Sitefinity Ecommerce will have the necessary components to create an online basic ecommerce store. There will be more features added in the upcoming months. Upcoming functionality for the first release will be:
- Product Types which will allow a merchant to create customizable types such as a Book with ISBN, author, year, etc…
- Departments will allow the merchant to categorize their products into a hierarchical structure with parent/child relationships.
- Buy Now button, just specify the product SKU.
- Future Releases will have many more features and not limited to the following:
- Product Reviews
- Product variations
- Flexible product pricing
- Manufacturers
- Promotions and Discounts
- More payment processors and shipping providers
- More reporting
- Inventory Control
As always, we will appreciate any feedback you might have. We have opened a new forum thread, dedicated to this module.
Best wishes,
Sitefinity team.
