Homestead Blog

Our Storefront product is undergoing a big upgrade.  Here’s Amr from Marketing to share some of the highlights with you – Rochelle.

Intuit’s top-level ecommerce offering, Homestead Storefront, is being upgraded to expand your options and make it even more useful to you and your customers.  We’re adding a lot, and updating even more, so rather than give you just a couple of the new features I thought I’d give you the whole list.

So, first off here’s what will be new:

• One Page Checkout: One-Page checkout will give you a better way to guide your customers through the checkout process. This new checkout is streamlined compared to the old ‘Multi-Page Checkout’ which had many pages in the checkout flow. In One-Page checkout, your customers will remain on a single page with each step being completed on the left of the screen and then captured on the right of the screen in their invoice. As customers move through the checkout process, their invoice will be completed with each step.

• Store Administration Home Page: The store administration home page will give a Quick Store Status view, and provide an easy access to your store-hosting account, resources and tools, tutorials, and more.

• New Themes: Choose from ten new contemporary store themes.

• New Home Page Layouts: Choose from two new home page layouts.

• Logo Generator: If you don’t have a store logo, you’ll be able to create one in minutes using the logo generator! The logo generator will allow you to customize a clean, professional looking logo. You’ll be able to adjust the font size, color, and style, add a background, and add a tagline to your logo. Access this feature from Store Design > Logo.

• Store Administration Product List Changes: The store administration product list will be modified with a new look and feel. Common actions such as Add Product and Search will be added to the list.

• Unique Shipping Services for Each Product: A new shipping configuration option will be available that allows unique shipping services for each product. This option will allow you to configure up to three domestic and three international shipping services for each product. The configuration process will be very similar to shipping configuration options for eBay listings.

• eBay Listing Templates Update: eBay Listing Templates are being updated to support new shipping fields. Important: Shipping values that were valid in the old version of Storefront may no longer be valid in the new (e.g. certain package types, shipping services, etc.), and Domestic and International will now have Insurance and Handling fields. Once the upgrade has occured, we recommend that you open each of your existing eBay Listing Templates to ensure that your shipping is configured properly.

• Shopping Cart Cross-Sell/Up-Sell: This feature will allow you to show your customers other merchandise from your store by displaying up to six additional products on the shopping cart. Products will be displayed based on criteria that you can configure. Access this feature from Store Settings > General, under Shopping Cart and Checkout Options.

• Product Image Resize Options: When you upload new product images, Storefront will now automatically resize them for optimal display on your Product Details and Search Results pages. Access the product image resize options from Product > List, under Product Settings.

• Product Descriptions HTML Editor: You will now be able to enter your Product descriptions in an HTML editor while adding or updating a product.

• New Marketing Section: You’ll be able to access all marketing tools in one convenient place. Store Promotions, E-Mail Marketing, Search Optimization, and Comparison Shopping will be located in the new Marketing section.

• Automated Google Base Product Feed: Storefront will automatically submit your product feed to Google Base, so you can start driving traffic to your web store! No account will be needed. Access this feature from the new Marketing page.

Secondly, in addition to adding new features we’re also resolving some existing issues that may have impacted some Storefront users.  Here’s what’s being done in this area:

• Resolving an issue that could cause an eBay Listing error if you attempted to list an item with Calculated International shipping with the Insurance option set to Optional, Required, or Included in Shipping and Handling, Domestic set to Flat, and International set to Calculated.

• Resolving an issue that could cause an error when listing an item to eBay or when saving a Listing template, in which the Combined Shipping Discounts, Promotions and Shipping Surcharge values were not getting set or saved correctly.

• Resolving an issue in Marketplaces in which an Image URL specified when configuring a Product would build incorrectly.

• Resolving an issue that prevented the Shipper Number on the invoice display from allowing entry of 40 characters.

• Resolving an issue that could cause LowInvNotifyInd to not reset to 0 after a Low Inventory notification had been sent for Attribute Products and the Attribute’s inventory was raised above the threshold.

• Resolving a browser error that could appear on the Attributes step of the Add Product Wizard within Internet Explorer.

• Resolving an issue that could cause Promotion Configuration errors.

• Resolving an issue that occurred when the United States Postal Service changed the Service Description of the International delivery method of First Class Mail International to no longer include a dash (’-').

• Resolving an issue that could cause omission of the index file when copying multi-file sitemaps to the content area.

• Resolving an issue with Copy Store Version that could cause the go.gif image used in the keyword search form to be copied with a default image instead of the appropriate one for the Theme associated with the original store version.

• The storefront registration, customer information, customer sign-in and member logon will now use SSL encryption when checkout security is enabled.

• Calculated product level shipping will require a minimum weight of one ounce.

• Resolving an issue that could cause incorrect calculation of shipping discount by omitting the first item packed from the calculated discount.

That’s a lot to digest I know, but what it all boils down to is a better Storefront product for you and your customers.  We’ll be sending Storefront users an email with more information about when the upgrade will take place.

Hope you like the changes!