Ips News 4.x 4.4: Store Filters and other Commerce updates

[ADMIN 361]

Allowing your customers to find exactly what they need as fast as possible will no doubt increase sales.

A good number of our customers use Commerce to sell physical items. Until now, it's always been a little tricky to set up the store to allow customers to drill down into specific items within the store.

In Invision Community 4.4, the sidebar in the store now includes filter options to help customers find the product they're looking for.

Using the filter sidebar

Administrators can set up whatever filters they like for each product. In this video above, you can see we have set up filters for color and price.

You can set these filters up in the AdminCP by simply specifying each possible option:

Creating a custom filter

Once the filters have been set up, you can then add each filter to the categories it applies to (so you can have different filters for different categories) and when editing any product you can specify as many values for each filter as is appropriate (for example, if you have a color filter, you can choose multiple colors if the product allows the customer to choose a color, or if the product has multiple colors).

Choosing the filter values when creating/editing a product

In addition to these custom filters, you will also see filters for price (you can set appropriate bands for each category), rating, and stock level.

Other Commerce Improvements

In addition, we also have a few more features new to Commerce in 4.4:

• There are new sidebar blocks for best selling products, latest products, product reviews and a featured product.
• When sending a bulk mail, you can target recipients by the total amount they have spent.
• Categories with no products in them are hidden automatically in the store.
• Notification emails sent to customers to let them know their purchase will expire soon (including if they will be automatically charged) have been improved to show more clearly what will happen.
• When viewing a customer page in the AdminCP, active purchases are separated from expired and cancelled purchases to make it easier to discern which are active.
• Custom field values are now included on printed invoices.
• When filtering support requests in the AdminCP, you can now choose "more than" or "less than" for all time-based filter options.
• When using stock actions to reply to support requests, the stock reply can be incorporated into the staff member's default reply content rather than overwriting it.
• Invoices in the AdminCP can now be filtered by status.

This blog is part of our series introducing new features for Invision Community 4.4.