tradeit ecommerce platform latest developments

Watch this space for all of the latest development news on our ecommerce platform, tradeit. Exciting features of each new release will be detailed here but if you would like to know more or would like a demo of our platform then please get in touch.

tradeit ecommerce platform version 4.7

 Improvements to URL structures

Improvements have been made to the way in which the platform handles and generates URL’s / URL structures. The enhancements made in this area give merchants new controls within the administration system which help to ensure consistency of URL’s throughout their site (normalising character case and handling of invalid characters as examples). The platform also supports the use of URL’s without the .html extension and gives options to use or loose the trailing slash at the end of URL strings. The result is cleaner and friendlier URL’s that are consistent, more professional and predictable.

Canonical tags

To help with natural search engine optimisation and avoid penalties for duplicate content canonical tags are now intelligently designed into the platform. This means that when viewing a product detail page where the product resides in multiple categories and the product has been assigned a main category and you are currently viewing the product in a non-main category, the headers of the page will contain a canonical tag to the URL of the product within the main category automatically.

Caching

Improving website performance is a key aspect of all development and so in this version, alongside the URL and navigational improvements, we’ve also introduced caching of URLs and the navigation structure to give a further boost to performance. Merchant controls over caching have also been added to the administration system to allow manual rebuilding of the caching.

Advert Display Conditions

Advert display conditions have been added so that an advert can be displayed on “All content pages”, “When any product is added to the basket”, “All category pages” and “All product pages”.

tradeit ecommerce platform version 4.6

 Gift wrapping enhanced

Gift wrapping has been extended so that as well as being able to gift wrap a complete order, order items can also be gift wrapped separately with different options for each item. The new gift wrapping options are setup and controlled within the administration system allowing item specific gift wrapping options to be defined. The configurable options that a customer is presented with through the storefront have also been enhanced to enable them to browse and select the gift wrapping options for each product.

Improved price lists

Price lists now allow for multiple parent and child price lists, increasing the platform’s flexibility in handling highly complex pricing structures (differential pricing for example) and makes the task of administering prices for large and diverse product catalogues across an ecommerce site or sites (international, business to business, etc.) more efficient.

Promotion sort order

Prior to tradeit version 4.6 the order in which promotions were validated and applied to the basket was fixed. In version 4.6 the promotion sort order can be manipulated by merchants within the administration system.

There are two influences on the order in which offers are applied to the basket; the customer selection type, and the priority of the discount type. Each customer selection is represented by a group of offers. Tradeit applies the most customer specific groups to a basket first; the following table shows the order in which offers will be applied based on the customer selection type:

  • 1. Session Specific Offer
  • 2. Coupon
  • 3. Specific Customer
  • 4. Customers in a User Group
  • 5. All Customers

There is a customer selection type hierarchy that is used within the platform by default. However, custom customer selection groups and discount type sub-groups can be added in addition to these and can be reordered to manipulate/customise the hierarchy to best effect.

Tradeit then applies certain discount types before others to try and optimise the amount of discount given to the customer without compromising the merchants’ sale. Each discount type is represented by a sub-group under each customer selection group. The following shows the order in which we apply discount types by default:

  • 1. Fixed Price Product
  • 2. Percentage Amount off a Product
  • 3. Fixed Amount off a Product
  • 4. Percentage Amount off an Order
  • 5. Fixed Amount off an Order
  • 6. Free Product(s)
  • 7. Get Cheapest Free
  • 8. Free Shipping
Security enhancements

Tighter security measures give merchants even great control over user access to administration areas in both the storefront and administration system. The new security measures follow stringent PCI standards and many of the new features are under merchant control through the administration system.

User lockout policies:
Merchants are now able to enforce rules for users to temporarily lockout a user, prohibit a session and or prohibit an IP address out of an account when a number of failed authentication attempts occur within a specific time period.

User password policy:
Enforce rules for a minimum number of characters, case sensitivity, required numerical and special characters, limiting repetition of characters, restricting users from including their email address or login, maintain a list of prohibited words, set the number of times that a password can be reused and set a number of days before a password expires and whether to force a user to change or not when it does expire.

HTTPS enforcement:
By default all content pages marked private, all checkout stages and login pages are forced to use HTTPS protocol to ensure security of sensitive data.

tradeit ecommerce platform version 4.5

This month sees the 3rd version release of the tradeit ecommerce platform in 2011. The development within version 4.5 touches upon many areas of the platform and brings general improvements to a number of day-to-day operational tasks.

Enhanced gift wrapping options

tradeit 4.5 sees enhancements to the gift wrapping options that you can offer your customers. The gift wrapping component now allows the customer to choose an order item gift wrapping option per item and enter a gift wrapping message per item if they have specified that they want certain items gift wrapped. Allowing admins to have greater control over the pricing options / structure of gift wrapping as well as improving the storefront representation of these choices in the storefront / basket delivers a better experience for customers.

Improved pricing structure

Updates to pricing bands for products defining the Was price, Now price & RRP.

Improvements to stock handling

Fine tuning the process for handling stock in certain scenarios such as when a customer abandons their basket etc.

Improvements to returns handling

Improvements to the handling of returns through the administration system and data feeds required for integrations with stock systems. The enhancements allow merchants to allocate return quantities against individual order items.

Improved PIM interface and management of variations

We’ve made managing products within categories easier by removing variations from view allowing better sorting of products. We’ve also added a full text search capability to further enhance the platform’s capabilities when dealing with large numbers of products. A tradeit site has recently launched with over 1m SKUs.

CyberSource payment integrations

tradeit has integration with both Cybersource HOP (visible) and SOAP (invisible) payment interface types. The SOAP interface was integrated with tradeIT’s order management process. In tradeIT 4.5 the HOP interface can be used to take payment, this is preferred by most merchants as it aids PCI DSS compliance, whilst the order management process is handled through the SOAP interface.

tradeit ecommerce platform version 4.4

Red is pleased to announce the release of tradeit version 4.4. This latest release the brand new intelligent adverts engine as well as a complete redesign and rebuild of the facets framework and user interfaces, the introduction of new reporting for promotions and more.

Offers and coupons reporting

Focus your promotional efforts and maximise your sales opportunities by reporting the success of your offers and coupons. The new offers and coupons reporting functionality gives merchants at a glance insight as to the performance of their promotions through the new reporting area. In addition to the new reporting area information on promotions is now linked through to the Order Management System (OMS), giving merchants visibility and complete audit trails for discounts applied to orders.

Reports on offer:

  • View Products Ordered
  • View Orders By Order Status
  • View Orders By Payment Method
  • View Orders By Customer
  • View Revenue By Categories

The offers and coupons report information can also be filtered in the following ways:

  • Date Range
  • Channel / Domain
  • Currency
  • Order Status
  • Group By (Offers / Coupons)

Intelligent ecommerce advertising engine

The new advertising engine enables merchants to merchandise content, products and promotions within advert zones across their stores based on the configurable rules based engine.

  • Manage the content for advertising zones across your site targeting specific users with adverts.
  • Use product adverts to drive personalised cross-sells and up-sells e.g. recommendations etc.
  • Populate advert zones with HTML, images, videos, flash objects or products.
  • Configure your adverts to either display within a page or as a pop-up.
  • Select specific users to target based on their grouping, location and search terms.
  • Schedule adverts to come on and off the website setting specific start and end times and dates.
  • Control which adverts appears in which advert zones in which templates and pages.
  • Ecommerce enabled sites can link adverts in with the promotions engine, presenting personalised discounts and offers.
  • Triggering adverts based on user’s onsite search terms.

Faceted navigation, search results and product listings

Reengineered and redesigned for far greater control, power and flexibility, tradeit version 4.4 gives merchants the opportunity to configure and apply facets to enhance their site navigation, search results and product listing templates.

  • Manage facets using tradeit’s administration system.
  • Create facets based on product attributes such as size, colour and brand as examples.
  • A product can have one or more values set against each attribute e.g red, green blue etc.
  • Layered filtering on and off of facets.
  • AJAX results displaying without the need to reload the page.
  • Set the minimum number of values that the facet must contain before the facet is displayed or before it’s not displayed.
  • Configure how many values should be displayed when the facet is displayed. If there are a lot of values then the list can be contracted and made to expand by clicking on a more link.
  • Facets using a numerical attribute such as prices can have bands configured to group values together e.g. £10-£25, £25-£50, etc.
  • Vendors can configure when a facet is displayed, whether that is across all categories, specific categories or when a search has been triggered and a category has not been selected.
  • Merchants can also configure the priority of each facet to determine the order in which facets are displayed.
  • Facets can be configured to be displayed as a value is selected.
  • Flexible display controls for users including, links, checkboxes, dropdowns and sliders as examples.
  • Wide reaching, including simple products, main products and variants.
  • Search engine friendly URLs created from using facets.

tradeit ecommerce platform version 4.3

The latest version of Red’s market leading ecommerce platform, tradeit is here. The 4.3 release includes the unveiling of the new basket API, the introduction of product aliases to better mould to existing business models and workflows and the introduction of the user dashboard.

Basket API

It is now possible to add products to the basket, update the quantity of the products in the basket, delete products in the basket and retrieve the contents of the basket via a set of SOAP Web Services. This new basket API functionality means that tradeit’s market leading promotions engine and checkout (optional) can now be integrated into an existing ecommerce site.

Product aliases

Particularly beneficial for B2B businesses, product code aliases can be used to help customers locate products without searching for a product using the product code allocated to the product by the merchant but a product code that the customer knows the product by (maybe a product code they were using when they dealt with a previous supplier).

New user dashboard

A new dashboard interface has now been added to the latest version of tradeit. The new dashboard interface displays quick links, domain selection and lists the most recent orders placed through the website. Using the dashboard merchants can at a glance see the most recent order activity across their online stores and interrogate individual orders.

tradeit ecommerce platform version 4.2

Red is pleased to announce the release of tradeit version 4.2. This latest release includes a brand new customer self-service feature set. tradeit’s self-service features provide essential functionality to any business selling online, helping retailers and merchants to meet the needs and expectations of both their B2C & B2B customers.

Improving customer service and ordering experience whilst reducing admin time and costs

As well as improving the ordering and aftersales experience for customers the self-service features also help to reduce the strain on your business by allowing customers to manage their orders / accounts themselves.

tradeit customer self-service features:

  • Create and view any returns
  • A business can create / manage a primary account with many sub-accounts setting permissions, credit limits and authorisation workflows
  • What individuals with sub accounts can see or do in the system is controllable by the primary business account holders
  • Customers can view previous orders including status of orders and line items
  • Place or authorise orders placed by your other accounts
  • View and investigate back orders
  • View account and invoice information including the ability for customers to pay for invoices by credit card and see credit limits
  • Customers can create and manage own sub category of the website
  • Request email me when back in stock
  • Quick reorder from previous orders
  • View statements (e.g. invoices)
  • Manage members (multi account)
  • Service request form
  • Staff can create baskets and prepopulate them for a client to review and checkout at their leisure
  • Roles based permissions system gives granular control over call centre & mail order staff

tradeit ecommerce platform version 4.1

The latest version of our ecommerce platform tradeit has now been released. This latest release features full order management giving merchants instant up-to-date visibility on order activity across their sites.

Investigate process and print orders

View complete order histories for your customers, check on and update order statuses, process returns and generate credit notes, print order confirmations, invoices and packing slips.

Receipts and order line items

View payment information for orders including receipt value, transaction references and authorisation codes. You can now also view the details and attributes for each product line item in an order.

Custom workflows

Fully configurable workflows within the platform allow merchants to define their processes exactly how they want them. Workflows can be configured to automatically trigger a number of actions to occur including send email, increments status, re-allocate product stock, capture authorisation, cancel authorisation and process return. These auto triggered actions help to ensure a smooth and streamlined process keeping the customer well informed throughout.


tradeit e-commerce platform version 4

This summer sees the version 4 release of our powerful ecommerce platform tradeit. Our ecommerce platform tradeit brings together the latest e-commerce features, content management and e-marketing.

Our development roadmap is largely driven by our clients, multi-channel retailers and online merchants operating in both business to consumer and business to business environments across a variety of sectors, following and shaping current and future ecommerce best practice.

In-Site Editing

Version 4 introduces market leading in-site editing content management functionality that enables administrators to edit sites in a faster, easier and more natural way. Our new in-site editing functionality means that your sites content to be administered directly through the store front. Create new pages, edit content including images, flash and video.

Zones and Content Elements

The in-site editing works based on content zones and elements, within the site templates there a number of editable zones defined for each page of your site. The editable zones are made visible to the administrator once they have logged in through the store front. Once logged in an admin menu bar will be displayed at the top of the site allowing quick and easy access to the editing options. Our roles/rules based permissions system gives total control and security allowing content changes to be made and stored for reviewing and publishing live later.


tradeit e commerce platform version 3.9

Attract, engage and reengage customers like never before with our new rules based promotions engine. One of the most powerful ecommerce promotion engines on the market gives merchants the chance to engage with their customers at the vital stages of the user journey. The promotions engine works in harmony with the built-in email marketing engine offering merchants multiple communication channels.

Highly targeted personalised promotions

Personalise and target your promotional activities by creating customer groups within the platform to enhance campaign performance. Promotional offers can be applied to session, customer, customer groups, categories, product, product groups, specific brands and all products. The rules around the management of promotions is highly configurable and gives administrators total control over the start/end date and time of offers, minimum spend, con/cannot be used in conjunction with other offers, how many times an offer can be used per customer / overall.

The new ecommerce promotions engine allows merchants to create the following discounts and offers:


  • % off an order
  • % off a product(s)
  • £,$ or euro off an order
  • £,$ or euro off a product(s)
  • Fixed price product
  • Free products
  • Free shipping
  • Get cheapest free
  • Bundles (e.g. buy 2 get 1 free, 3 for £10)
  • Coupons
  • Buy X get Y free
  • Free gift / sample
  • Tiered spend and save discounts

Promotion Examples


  • Buy 3 from these selected products and get 10% off
  • Buy 1 get a free gift or free sample
  • 5% off your order when you spend £50 or more
  • £15 off E7247 Speaker
  • 10% off E7247 Speaker
  • Use coupon code DISC10 for 10% selected products
  • Spend £50 and get 10% off, spend £100 and get 20% off
  • Buy 1 get 1 free
  • Free gift wrapping
  • Buy E7247 speaker and get 10% off a pair of headphones
  • Buy any 2 pairs of headphones and get the cheapest free
  • Free shipping when you spend £100

 

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