New on Shopfront: January & February 2024

Welcome to what’s new on Shopfront for January & February 2024. Following on from the last few months, we’ve continued with the quality of life improvements and ensured bugs have been getting squashed!

Note: Some of these changes are gradually rolling out to stores, some of the changes may not be received in your store for a couple of weeks.

Major Features

Freight Distribution Rules

In the past, Shopfront has had only one way to distribute freight across products (based on how many items are being purchased), however we know each supplier might charge for and distribute freight differently, so we’ve implemented two more methods of distributing freight.

Items – this is the traditional way we’ve distributed freight in Shopfront, each item is compared against every other item and gets the same freight (so 24 beers get four times the freight as six wines, 12 beers get two times the freight as six wines)
Cases – a flipped version of items, where the cases are compared together instead of the items (so 24 beers get the same freight as six wines, 12 beers get half the freight of six wines)
Mixed – a mode which first compares the cases against each other (like the Cases mode), and then any leftover items are compared against each other like the Items mode.

You can specify the distribution settings per supplier in your supplier edit page.

Accounts Flow Rewrite

Whilst the Accounts Flow integration has worked pretty well, it has needed a rewrite for quite a while (it was the only integration left from version one that hadn’t been rewritten).

You should receive invoices quicker as they’re now pushed from Accounts Flow instead of being fetched on a schedule,
Distribution rules now apply to Accounts Flow invoices without having to manually re-enter data (including the new freight distribution rules),
New suppliers are created with the supplier name instead of their ABN number,
A number of bug fixes have also been included (such as items with decimal places in invoices now being supported)

This is rolling out in the background across each Vendor using the current Accounts Flow integration over the next few weeks.

Minor Features

Improved the readability of reports on the user dashboard,
Improved dark mode handling across Shopfront,
Increased the speed massive orders (thousands of items) load,
Added a sale key for paying with Shopfront’s built-in loyalty,
Sales can no longer be cancelled from the sales history when there is a gift card present,
When no sale keys are on a page you no longer receive a red error page, instead you get a nice message,
Sale keys now reload when embedded applications are marked as being ready, allowing certain integration keys to work on slow devices,
Packages now dynamically calculate costs like baskets do,
Added confirmation when removing a Register or Outlet from the Account & Billing page,
The inventory movement report can now display products that have not had any movements during the period,
Improved the design of the price list edit screen for small devices (like mobile phones),
Added explanations of what each graph is on the reporting dashboard,
Added warning of an open stocktake when editing orders,
Comments made on order reviews can now been seen while editing an order,
It’s now possible to disable statistics from printing on the register closure,
Added ability to select which Outlets will receive automatic promotions based on promotion categories,
Added a new Duplicate Customer pattern to the security centre to detect a customer being added to multiple sales on the same day,
Inventory at Date reports now use the cost for the specific Outlet instead of the global cost,
Added a large amount of validation into the general settings page,
Redesigned the everyday tickets page for mobile devices,
Temporary products are now routinely cleaned up if they’re not in use, preventing them from being reused after a period of time (instead they’ll be automatically recreated from scratch),
Required dependencies for permissions are now displayed when you hover over a permission which is disabled,
Added sound effects for new notifications and barcodes not found,
Added check for changes before leaving the price list edit page without saving,
The location selector now skips the Outlet selection if only one Outlet exists,
The media centre now supports selecting multiple items at once, allowing you to bulk delete and bulk insert content where appropriate,
Improved the design of the advanced promotion edit screen when using a small screen,
Vendor connections now feature a better tax rate matching algorithm,
Add new promotion categories to support further customisation of which promotions you receive from banner groups,
Roles can now be marked as “managed” which will use Shopfront’s default roles & permissions,
Future costs & prices now support setting values for families instead of just products,
[LMG] Receiving new promotions will display a notification in your store when they’re loaded,
[OnTap Data] Receiving new promotions will display a notification in your store when they’re loaded,
[Developer] Inactive webhooks are deleted six months after being marked as inactive,
[Developer] Added a password reset system,
[Developer] Improved the display of API log history,
[IBA E-Commerce] When a product is marked as inactive in Shopfront, it will now send across to IBA with an inventory level of zero, even if the product still has inventory,
[IBA Loyalty] When a customer is added to the sale the screen now returns back to the sale keys and transaction, no matter what was previously visible,
[IBA Loyalty] Improved display of the currently active customer,
[IBA Loyalty] The currently active customer now displays the point value instead of the number of points that are available to the customer,
[Linkly] Improved handling of missing messages when processing EFTPOS transactions,
[Thirsty Camel Hump Club] The deal product can no longer be discounted,
[Tyro] Improved handling of situations when Tyro becomes disconnected from Shopfront (e.g. power outages),
[Zen Global] When a customer is added to the sale the screen now returns back to the sale keys and transaction, no matter what was previously visible,
[Zen Global] Gift card ranges are now hidden by default when selling a gift card

Bug Fixes

Editing a product followed by changing Outlets no longer displays the incorrect cost when editing a transfer between Outlets,
Using different formats on the receipt compared to your store’s date and time format no longer results in invalid dates being shown with certain dates,
Scrolling the order edit page no longer jumps around when leaving an expanded item open,
The Outlet selector for the sales history and promotions view within the product view page now shows and uses the current Outlet,
Sending a receipt as a PDF attachment via email now correctly displays the receipt and not the text “A4 Receipt preview unsupported”,
Scrolling the user dashboard while the mouse is over the header of the table now scrolls as expected,
Previous promotions no longer appear in the report search when include deleted is disabled,
Prevented the name of images and videos on the customer display edit page from taking up the space of the preview,
The revision history difference now highlights the correctly added row, instead of the last one,
CSV files that contained only carriage returns and no line feeds now works as expected instead of not importing anything,
Prevented users from being able to edit inventory if the product edit screen is logged out by a user who has permission and then logged in with a user who doesn’t have permission,
Large external stocktakes no longer fail to import when there are thousands of unmatched barcodes,
Values in pie graphs are no longer shown if they don’t fit within their wedge,
Viewing all statements from the balances page no longer crashes when you don’t have any customers,
The inventory movement report no longer includes products that did not exist during the period run,
Minimising a group on a large report now correctly loads additional groups which were previously not visible,
Adding two customers to a sales report and excluding both no longer prevent No Customer results from appearing,
Prevented the supplier view page graph from having dollar values cut off,
The reference column on unconsolidated payment method reports now appears as expected and doesn’t prevent the report from running,
Prevented waiting for embedded applications which aren’t accessible over the network,
Customer statements no longer show Shopfront as the “from” address when emailed, if we can’t determine which Outlet you’re currently in, the first Outlet’s name will be used instead,
Fixed max on hand calculation when generating an order from sales,
[IBA Loyalty] Attempting to add a customer online with a customer number now adds the customer number as expected (other fields aren’t searchable while offline),
[Thirsty Camel Hump Club] The Hump Club deal product no longer displays the discounting below cost dialog,
[Xero] Disabling a tenant and then instantly reconnecting the tenant no longer causes the page to infinitely load,
[Zen Global] The surcharge product should no longer fail to retrieve when you’re logged out