Get ready for a new ePages release from eCorner

When can you expect to be upgraded?

We are still in the initial planning phase but as soon as we have competed the initial work, we will make a decision on the upgrade timing. The upgrade will occur mid-week and late at night to minimise the impact on your businesses.

Who will be upgraded?

All of our customers that are currently using the V6 'mass-hosted' environment will be automatically upgraded. Those customers on an older version should contact us to have an upgrade scheduled. Customers in a dedicated environment should also contact eCorner support (or their account representative) to schedule an individual upgrade. If you are running in an eCorner or ePages partner environment then please contact your service provider.

What do you need to do to prepare?

You don't really need to do anything before the upgrade. There will be an outage window during the upgrade process and during that outage your website (and site administration) will be unavailable. In the lead up to (and during) the upgrade period we request that you stop making content changes and do not recommence until you receive the "upgrade complete" notification from eCorner. We will provide notifications by email, Facebook, Linkedin, Google+ and Twitter. When we have provided you with the date and time of the upgrade, you may like to notifiy your customers in advance that your website will not be accessible during the upgrade period.

How will we know how to use the new features?

eCorner will schedule webinar training sessions that will cover the new features in the weeks leading up to the upgrade. These will be recorded and available as a download from the eCorner YouTube Channel.

What are some of the new features and enhancements?

App & Theme Store: Enhance your online shop

Within the administration panel, merchants will be able to enhance their online shop with 'apps' which cover email marketing, accounting, logistics or market place connections. Third party developers will be able to create apps that target many different use cases. In the App & Theme Store merchants will be able to also purchase new themes that modernise the design of their storefront with just a few clicks.

Fully responsive storefront editor

ePages has developed a completely new storefront content editor in fully responsive design. Merchants will be able to easily built and edit content of their online shop using the new editor that includes drag and drop for all objects and optimise the user experience for all kinds of devices. As information becomes available for this new content editor we will keep you updated.

New High Level Features in ePages 6.17

Top sellers in the dashboard

The dashboard of your online shop gives you a comprehensive overview of various interesting facts and figures concerning the merchant's shop. Now you can view a list of the most popular products in the dashboard, including thumbnail pictures of the products and the number of sales.

New design templates for your shop

ePages 6.17 contains four new design templates. These fresh templates make it easy to give your shop a very modern design.

eBay: simplified editing of multiple items simultaneously

Do you use eBay as an additional sales channel and list new products often? If so, the new function for importing and exporting eBay listings will make life much easier. Edit multiple listings simultaneously using software like Excel or Open Office.

Shippo: Print shipping labels for various logistic providers

Shippo allows merchants to easily print shipping labels, compare rates, track packages and much more. Based in the US, Shippo has integrated all the major US logistic providers (DHL, USPS, UPS, FedEx) and merchants can benefit from discounted shipping rates. With more integrations to come, Shippo will also enable ePages merchants to use logistic providers in the UK and Canada.

Easymarketing helps ePages merchants with customer acquisition

Easymarketing is a company offering automated Google advertising and optimisation. The service is analysing the shop’s URL automatically and provides information on how often the offered products are searched for. In addition, the software visually shows how many new customers per month are to be expected.

Dedicated tax matrix for the USA

The tax matrix for the US will provide every merchant in the United States with an automatic tax solution. During the setup of the shop, the merchant will need to enter his shop’s location. This address will be used automatically as the physical location of the shop. The only information the merchant needs to add are the tax rates applicable to the state where they have a business location. The merchant will also be able to add tax classes, change tax rates manually and add new locations.

Dedicated tax matrix for Canada

In Canada the merchant needs to collect the tax rates of the customer's location. The tax matrix for Canada will automatically provide the merchant with the correct tax rate for every sale during the checkout.

PayPal PLUS: Four payment methods in one

PayPal PLUS combines the four most favoured payment methods in just one extension: PayPal, debit, credit card or invoice. The advantage for the merchant is that all transactions will be gathered in their PayPal account.

Packlink: Shipping labels for European logistic providers

Packlink is a delivery price comparison service based in Spain, which supports a large variety of national and international logistic providers throughout Europe. With the Packlink Pro service, merchants will have the opportunity to print labels for these logistic providers in a very convenient way.

Setup Wizard: improved usability

The shop setup wizard will get an overhaul with various usability improvements. It will make it even more convenient for the merchant to create his online shop in a quick and easy way.

Updated functionality and features details

Stock levels are shown in the object selection dialog in the administration

The object selection dialog used to insert objects (like a product into a newsletter) now shows the stock level of a product.

Updated design of facebook shop 

To follow up with Facebook's recent design changes, the facebook shop created from within the administration got an updated design as well.

Change product status sent to Google Shopping feed for products out of stock 

For shops allowing to order products out of stock, the availability setting posted to Google Base should be "available for order" for products with stock level 0 or below.

Notification text about privacy policy is removed from the registration form 

At the bottom of the registration form in the storefront a fix text "Privacy policy: No personal information will be given to third parties ..." was displayed. This text is not needed from a legal point of view. 

Attributes with the same name or ID are merged

If two product attributes have the same name (like "Color") but are of different attribute types (like "options" and "value selection") they are now still merged for the faceted search to allow filtering.

Speed-up of image display

The web server configuration is changed to extend the time an image is cached at the browser from 5 minutes to 1 day. This way the browser doesn't need to reload images that often - the reload of always visited shop pages gets faster.
A browser refresh (Ctrl+R or Ctrl+F5) forces the browser to load images in cases where an immeditate update of the image is desired.

New positioning of the fields in invoices

The position of the total amount in relation to net amount and taxes used to lead to some confusion, thus we changed how it appears on the invoice and order documents.

Standardise wording for "Themes" 

We want to avoid confusion that might happen through us using several different words for one thing. We decided to go with "Theme" throughout the application as well as the Marketplace. So from now on rather than "styles" or "Templates" you will consistantly see the new terminology of "Themes".