With the mark of the halfway point in the year, it’s the perfect time to recap all the features that have been added to the Bright Sites Company Store platform. Our team has spent the first half of the year enhancing storefront and user experience features to impress your clients. We’ve also put in a lot of work to help make things as easy as possible for you in the administrative area. And of course, security and system enhancements are always on the forefront of our development schedules. Take a look and let us know if we can help you put these new features to use!
Storefront Updates
Category Banner Images – Extend your client’s brand throughout the store by assigning a unique banner image to each main category. Category banners are a great way to enhance the look and feel of the store to get users excited to shop in the Company Store.
Gift Certificates & Coupons
Gift Certificate Product Type – A new product type allows users to purchase gift certificates directly from the storefront and send to another user. Bright Sites will automatically create the gift certificate code and send it to the recipient via email with a link to add the gift certificate balance to their account. Users can send gift certificates to up to ten people at a time. Creating a gift certificate product type for your client’s Company Store automates the gift certificate process so users can purchase them immediately and it saves you time in setting them up.
Order & Shipping Coupon Type – We expanded the coupon functionality to allow you to create a coupon type or a coupon code that can be used for the order total and the shipping cost.
Coupon Permissions – Coupon permissions allows you to control how coupons are used in the store. You can permission specific categories/products or groups. For example, you can create a coupon code to work just for the uniform category. Shoppers with a coupon for $50 off their uniform will be able to use that just for the products in that category.
User Experience Updates
Virtual Samples & Decoration Methods – New fonts, font styles, and the ability to upload custom fonts has been added. Expect more to come from this feature!
Shipping Base Rate – If your store has a Shipping Base Rate (or handling fee) that is added to the order, you can separate the shipping and shipping base rate on the checkout page in the storefront.
Shared Addresses – From the administrative area, you can define how you want the shared addresses to be sorted in the storefront. For example, you can sort them alphabetically by name, company, state, city, and more. This update keeps stores with a large amount of shared addresses nice and neat when new addresses are added.
Micro Store – If you use Micro Stores, you can now allow shoppers to move freely between Micro Stores in the same shopping session. Previously, shoppers picked a single path and they could only purchase from that Micro Store. Now, shoppers can add products to their cart from one Micro Store, go back to the landing page, and enter another Micro Store. Requires updates with our design team.
Product & Supplier Updates
PromoStandards – We’ve always offered a database of products so you can easily copy product information and images into your store and modify as you need. This year, we’ve integrated with PromoStandards to bring you full catalogs from suppliers who are also integrated with PromoStandards. We’ll continue adding more supplier catalogs to our database, check out our website for the latest!
Direct Supplier Integration – We are in the process of building direct supplier integrations for order push. What this means is that order details will go from your Company Store directly to a participating vendor’s system via API. We are currently supporting Vantage but are working to add more vendors including suppliers, decorators, and warehouses. Again, keep an eye out for more to come with this feature!
Manager Approval & Messaging Updates
Manager Order Approval System (MOAS) Denial Email – We’ve always offered a Manager Order Approval System in Bright Sites. This latest update will send an email to the shopper when an order is denied. Previously when an order was denied by a manager, the manager had the option to click a button to send an email to explain why. Now, that email will be automated and sent to the shopper when a manager does not approve their order.
SMS Text Notifications – We’ve added the capability to send notifications via text messages. Both admins and shoppers can get text message for various store notifications:
- Order Confirmations
- Shipping Confirmations
- MOAS Approvals & Denials
Admin Area Updates
Dashboard Metrics – The admin area includes monthly metrics and daily breakdowns of orders, users, integration hits, and SMS messages. This is a really good way to get a quick snapshot of the volume going through your store on a monthly basis.
Product Listing Search Option – If you are using integrated shipping rates with FedEx, UPS, USPS, you have to set-up weight and dimensions for each product to get an accurate shipping rate. We’ve created a search filter that will show only the products missing any of the following shipping dimensions: height, length, width, weight. This filter keeps you from having to click through each product to find the ones missing these dimensions. Once you have these fields filled out completely, the shipping integrations will run smoothly.
Multiple API Updates:
- Improved Documentation & Formatting – Easier for you and your programmers to read and use.
- API Key Permissions – You can set-up with your APIs to control who has access to what giving your store more security.
- Added Tax Code to Order API
Security & System Updates
Improved Scalability – Major improvements to allow Bright Sites and Bright Orders to better handle traffic bursts. Previously, if there was a huge launch to the store, it can affect how the entire system performs. We have been putting in major efforts to make sure our system can handle large traffic bursts without affecting other stores.
Security Updates – Ongoing updates to ensure your stores are always secure, private, compliant, and the data remains protected.
System Enhancements – We are always enhancing our core code so your stores perform at optimum speed with pages and product images loading quickly.
Data Center Move – Our servers are now located on the Google Cloud Platform. We moved data centers late last year and have continued to modify that process this year so our systems – beginning to end – are stronger and more streamlined than they have ever been.
We also added some exciting new features to the Bright Orders system to improve Simple Stores and order management. Check out our other blog post to get the updates.
Stay tuned, we’ve got a lot more coming in the second half of the year!