Catalogue & Ascend Integration
For our Ascend clients who make use of our product catalogue, we’ve made a major change in how we deal with categories.
Previously, the categories were taken from the product catalogue, so only matched products would be categorised. A category that was set from the product catalogue would also be given preference over your choice of category so there wasn’t much scope for you to adjust the categorisation. From your feedback it was clear to us that we needed to find a more flexible solution, so by working with the team at Ascend we’re now able to use the categories from your Ascend database.
We’ve added two areas within PinnacleApp™’s settings to manage this, Dealer Category Map and Deal Category Map Overrides. If you don’t already have access to these and would like access, please contact us.
You can use the Dealer Category Map area to upload a CSV-formatted version of your In-Store SKU Export. PinnacleApp™ will extract the In-Store SKU and category from the data provided. When your inventory is imported and a new product is found, we search your Dealer Category Map for the In-Store SKU. If there’s a match, the product is added to the corresponding category. If there’s no match, the product is added to Uncategorised as normal. Once a product has been added, the category will not be changed by the import process. You’re free to assign a category of your choosing.
You can use the Dealer Category Map Overrides to override the category from your In-Store SKU Export. This is useful for VAT-specific categories where the distinction isn’t required for ecommerce. For our existing clients using Glooware’s category structure we’ve set up your Dealer Category Map Overrides so that your categories from Ascend are overridden with Glooware’s categories. We’ve done this to reduce the impact of this change on your site. If you’d rather start a fresh with your Ascend categories, please get in touch and we can set you up for this.
We found that in some cases the brand obtained from the product catalogue would differ slightly from the brand taken from your Ascend database and duplicated or similar brands would be created. We’ve now altered our catalogue integration so that the brand isn’t updated. What you’ve entered in Ascend is what appears on your site.
Where products have been matched to ones in our catalogue we’re now updating your product with the product name from our catalogue. This should provide more relevant names than the ones used for your EPOS system.
Memcached
Memcached is an high-performance, distributed memory object caching system intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications. We have seamlessly implemented Memcached for all our clients - the net gain being less database calls meaning a more speedier, snappier and responsive web application. Memcached also scales very well and is a good option for a growing site as it is easy to add more capacity when needed with little maintenance implications. Furthermore, you are in good company using Memcached as some of the most visited sites on the net use it! For example: Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and Digg.
EU Cookie Bar
We’ve added a page to all sites giving details of the cookies that could potentially be used on your site. We’ve tried to provide an exhaustive list so in some instances all the cookies mentioned might not currently be in use on your site. We have added a link to this page in the footer of your site. See our cookie information page.
We believe this provides enough information to fully comply with the new EU cookie law. If you feel you’d like to use the CMS capabilities of PinnacleApp™ to create your own cookie information page to replace ours, this can be achieved by adding a page in the usual manor and making the URL “cookie-info”.
In addition to the cookie information page, we’ve also added a bar at the bottom of every site informing users of the use of cookies and providing a link to find out more which links to the cookie information bar. The bar can be dismissed so it is not shown again for at least 30 days. To achieve this a cookie is used.
Product Visibility
You can specify where you see a product on your site by setting the product’s visibility. When you’re editing a single or grouped product, you can choose from Category & Search, Category Only, Search Only and Not Visible.
When the creation of grouped product is automated through the integration with Ascend or Abacus the grouped product visibility was set to Category Only and the single products within it was set to Search Only. We’ve now changed this so that single products that are part of a grouped product will be hidden from category listings and search results (Not Visible). Grouped products will now have Category & Search visibility.
In addition to this process being automated as part of our EPOS integrations, if you create a grouped product yourself, the single products you select will automatically be set to Not Visible. If you later delete your grouped product or adjust the single products within it, the single products are returned to Category & Search visibility.
Category Hierarchy Improvements
You’re able to edit a category and view the products within a category from the Category Hierarchy and now we’ve added the ability to delete a category from this page as well. This has reduced the need for the dedicated Categories grid so we’ve removed that from the navigation. You can still get to the grid from the link within the Category Hierarchy area.
PayBreak Payment Method
We’ve now integrated with short-term and flexible loan provider, PayBreak. With PayBreak your customers are able to pay via a short-term loan for between £100 and £600. Find out more about PayBreak on their website.
Bug Fixes
We’ve rectified a few bugs in this release.
When viewing a category that contained additional subcategories a user’s sort preferences are now acted upon, previously specifying a new sort order had no effect.
When picking single products to create or update a grouped product sometimes grouped products would be returned when you searched. This is now correctly restricted to just single products.