Blog: April 2011
Roundup of Recent storeBlox CS Upgrades
April 28, 2011
Now, customers can approve or reject orders within emails themselves
As always, we’re constantly making minor improvements to storeBlox CS. Many of them are based directly on customer feedback — which we love — and here is a passel of improvements recently rolled out to all storeBlox CS customers:
- Order Approval Process improvements: Approvals can now be approved/rejected from the approval email via a link – logging in is no longer required to take action on order approvals
- Real-time shipping API improvements: If you prefer to run all your shipping charges at residential rates (sometimes users do not select this, even when the address is residentail), you can now force residential shipping rates for the entire store.
- Order Exports: We’ve now added custom field export to the Order Management System export feature.
If you’ve got any questions about implementing these features or have suggestions of your own, please let us know!
Tags: e-commerce storeBlox CS webBlox
More Integration Goodness
April 25, 2011
New integration modules make storeBlox CS integration simple.
storeBlox CS already has deep support for integration with other systems, but we’ve made it even better by adding the ability to manage integration modules directly in webBlox. Depending on your needs, you can plug in integration modules for any of the following functions:
- Order Integration: post-processing of orders in real-time to the system of your choice.
- Pre-order Integration: real-time “punch-out” to external order systems during the order process for outside validation and processing actions, such as your own credit card validation systems
- Billing Validation: Plug in custom business logic for billing validation, such as order requirements for specific groups of credit card numbers.
Bing Ascendant?
April 13, 2011
Interesting news in the search landscape today: Microsoft’s search engine product, better known as Bing.com, has exceeded 30% of search market share for the first time ever. It’s interesting (and heartening, in our opinion, because real competition in the space is badly needed) to see another search engine gain at the expense of Google, because the trend for so many years has been exactly the opposite. Congratulations, Redmond.
There are, as always, a couple of caveats worth noting. First of all, that roughly 30% market share isn’t all Bing.com and their related apps and search products. Half of it is Yahoo!, who long ago gave up on improving their own search engine and “contracted out” the technology to Bing. Bing-branded market share is really only about 15%. Nevertheless, any growth against Google by competing services is impressive.
Second, it’s possible that, in addition to the Yahoo! deal, Bing’s growth can be attributed to their aggressive deal-making and sponsorships over the last year or so. In addition to its own position as the default search engine on Windows Phone 7 devices, Bing has inked deals with Android handset makers to deliver Bing-co-branded phones. Some Android enthusiasts call this aggressive bundling of sponsored apps and services by carriers on many Android phones “junkware,” but there’s no doubt that we’ll see more and more of this as a way for wireless carriers to subsidize hardware cost.
