True to form, AmeriCommerce listened to customer feedback and has focused on a few routine areas of the product with the 2010.4 (and 2010.3) releases of the AmeriCommerce ecommerce solution enabling merchants to sell online.  Additionally, some great new features and integrations have also been added along with some next generation features that will extend the flexibility of the shopping cart platform. 

Another noteworthy mention is that AmeriCommerce has always used our own software for our own website and payments.   However we’ve always used a mix of tools for the customer relationship management, accounting and order management systems due to the requirements that we have.  With version 2010.4 the AmeriCommerce system is used entirely for our own customer and order management dropping our reliance on other tools and systems.  This proves the power of our platform and how it has grown over the years.  This shift results in better understanding of our system from sales up through accounting and beyond.  This is a great advantage to our customers because every employee touches the system and features on a daily basis, even positions that were previously isolated from using it.  We use most aspects of our software alongside our customers and due to that understanding and comradery we can innovate better and faster for the good of us all.

Here’s an overview of a few of the key features we’ve added in v2010.4.  Be sure to review the revised order process so your team will be ready when your site is updated.

New Custom Workflow Engine
This new feature extension will allow a business to take control of their data workflows and create custom triggers and events that happen in response to events the shopping cart system is already performing.  Tap into new orders placed and add new alerts, send info to external systems, set custom fields to new values, add/remove from drip series and so much more.  All of this is configured by the merchant based on their specific needs.  The rule engine looks for conditions that match and when matches are found, the ‘actions’ are taken.  An action is what the rule is to ‘do’.

• New Workflow Engine Types, Event Types, Conditions, Actions
• Change customers, orders and more based on rules
• Automatically add/remove customers to mailing lists and drips series based on criteria
• Send custom email alerts to specified email addresses based on rules
•   

New Scheduled Export Engine
Schedule exports to send data files to remote FTP servers or to folders on your own server.  This allows automation of order and customer exports to external systems and allows you to save the file translations and formatting for repeated/scheduled use.

• Schedule Automated Exports
• Export to FTP Servers
• Post Export Processing Options
• 

New Add To Cart Capabilities
As we further extend our remote external site and system carting tools and our API carting tools we continue to add features to these areas.  This allows any website or desktop program to use your AmeriCommerce storefront as a catalog, carting and ordering system.  Empower any tool or website on any platform or service to take orders by just supplying the proper information to the cart system.  Manage as much or as little of the carting/checkout process using our system.

• Create/Maintain shopping carts over the AmeriCommerce from any application or website
• Create/Maintain orders out of the carts you make from any application or website
• Basic External Site Remote Carting Enhanced Using Url and Posting methods
• Any site or application can now put add to cart buttons and do cart management
• Any site or application can now order without ever going to your AmeriCommerce site

Customer Changes
The changes to the Customer area involved mostly cosmetic and previews of the data that resides in other modules of AmeriCommerce.  And adding better support for tracking information for each customer including better custom field visibility, better notes and email tracking and more which allow a merchant to keep track the most valuable asset they have, their customers.

• Add quick notes & emails with attachments to customers
• Customer Edit becomes new home for historical data
• Fast balance preview on customers
• Edit and Add Addresses manually
• Email Attachments capability added, with logging
• Add a note capability added
• Search by many new criteria including custom fields
• New fields added to the customer list for showing balance, segmentation and more
• 

Order Changes 
After listening to customer feedback we have streamlined the order and customer areas of our platform for easy management.  This involved putting information at our customer’s fingertips as well as providing advanced tools and access to the information and processes they need at the time.  For orders, this involved reworking the order edit and management pages considerably.  Cutting the time to enter an order into seconds vs. minutes and adding more visibility into the products being added to an order.

• See http://www.americommerce.com/kb/afmviewfaq.aspx?faqid=373 for an overview of functional changes (and release history)
• Quick search/entry fields for products & customers
• Screen refreshed to be streamlined and fit in smaller space
• Password reset capability right from order
• Item images and more information on order items
• Easier Authorization, Capture and Adjustments for Payments
• Address Book capabilities added
• View Order made smaller and easily printable
• Coupon Codes, Affiliate Tracking & Adcode Tracking added
• 

Drip Series Changes

• Better Drip Series List Management and Visibility
• Auto assignments added for after order placed through workflow engine
• Can follow up and ask for reviews after 7 days and more.

New Front End Features and Changes

• Carousel/Product Sliders Controls & Vertical Carousel Snapins Added
• New Snapins/Product Sliders (Recently Viewed, Viewed This but Bought These, Deal a Day)
• New Snapin: Tabs Control, can use anywhere
• Product Picture Zoom and Popups Enhanced, Lightbox style
• Discount Rules display on front end
• Tell a Friend Feature & Emailing Added
• Custom Layout on Order Based Email Templates
• New Paging Controls added for Lists
• Search Engine Friendly and Stylable Tabs Added for Products
• Cleaner 'No Image' added
• 

Other

• Check Box List added to Custom Fields Display Type
• Ability to add Store Level Custom Fields
• New color picker added with full color range capabilities
• Html Wysiwyg Editor updated with many new features
• 

New Integrations
There were some great new integrations added that support customers both large and small.  This helps us continue our edge of having the most integrations of any platform today.  Over 175 and building.

• CartSpan - PeachTree Accounting Now Supported
• ExactTarget Mailing Management
• AddThis Social Networking Linking & Notification
• Tivoli Access Manager Single Signon Support Added
• Commerce XML (CXML) Hooks Allow Custom CXML Integrations
• Paymentech Orbital Certified
• Aisle7 Content Server Integration
• TMP Warehousing and Fulfillment Systems Integration
• Standard Register Printing & Fulfillment Systems Integration

New Tools

• JQuery Tabs, Slider & Date Pickers
• Telerik Management Tools Updated
• Highslide Image Tools Added

Be sure to review the revised order process so your team will be ready when your site is updated.  See http://www.americommerce.com/kb/afmviewfaq.aspx?faqid=373