Welcome to what’s new on Shopfront for February 2021! We’ve got new ways to test promotions, a whole bunch of accounting integration improvements and more!

Upcoming Changes

Before getting on to the normal programming, we’re just giving you a heads up with a couple of upcoming changes.

During March we’re moving to a new mail provider to improve delivery time and reduce failed emails, because of this, we’re changing where emails come from that are sent from within Shopfront. Currently when you’re sending receipts to customers they’re from receipts@[your-subdomain].onshopfront.com and statements are from statements@[your-subdomain].onshopfront.com.

This will now change to instead all come from [your-subdomain]@onshopfront.com. You’ll also receive more emails from this email address which were previously coming from [email protected]. Nothing is required on your side with these changes, however we thought we’d give you a heads-up in case you have any email rules setup for Shopfront emails.

The second major upcoming feature which is already rolling out is our new authentication for integrations. Previously when you approved an integration they essentially acted as you and received all of the same permissions as you. This worked fairly well, however it lead to not knowing exactly what each integration would be doing and meant that integrations would be affected when your permissions were changed.

Instead, integrations will now specify which permissions they require and when authenticated they’ll be created as an internal user within your POS system (which will automatically be removed if you revoke the integration). This leads to more transparency with what integrations are doing and prevents integrations from losing access to some features due to permission changes. When authenticating the integration, you’ll now be required to use a user who has the modify_integrations permission (same as before), but also all of the permissions the integration is requiring.

Major Features

Promotion Simulator

Want to test out a promotion before it has started or need to test it out on a non-register? Now you can with the promotion simulator. Simply edit a promotion, enable the promotion simulator in the bottom right-hand corner and add the products you want to test.

Dark Mode

Currently in beta, dark mode is now available for all stores. You can enable the dark mode by going to the Menu > Setup > General > Registers, select the register you want to enable the setting for and then change the dark mode setting to one of Force Light Mode (default), Force Dark Mode or Auto (this will use your operating system setting to determine whether to display Shopfront in dark or light mode).

We’re still improving how it looks on each page, but it should be ready to use in the vast majority of places.

Import Gift Cards

Have some gift cards to create without selling them? Now you can import gift cards directly from a CSV file. Head over to the Menu > Customer Management > Gift Cards > Functions > Import Gift Cards to get started, you’ll need a CSV ready with the following columns:

• code,
• balance,
• original (optional),
• outlet (for multi-store vendors)

Alongside importing gift cards, we’ve also added the ability to see where the gift card was created from with the new creation source column on the gift card page, this will specify whether it came from a sale, a file import or from an integration.

Minor Features

• Sales order references now appear on customer statements in the “reference” column,
• Added default statement template when creating a new statement,
• The products contained within a basket and the parents of products have been added to the product view page,
• Added a filter box to the trashed items page,
• Refund amount is now displayed in a dialog after the refund is completed to ensure the refund is provided to customers,
• Price calculation has been moved to a dedicated worker thread to prevent the price calculation from freezing the UI on complex long-running calculations,
• Cross promotion count will now automatically turn on when a promotion takes longer than 400ms to calculate with cross promotion count disabled,
• Added a new option to customer groups to automatically print parked sales receipts,
• Added a new action report type, modified sales,
• Added a new permission, “See Only Recent Register Closures” which allows users with the permission to see register closures which have been closed within the last 12 hours and by that user,
• [MYOB / Xero] Transfers between stores can now be sent to the accounting integrations,
• [MYOB / Xero] Transfers to transferees can now be sent to the accounting integrations,
• [MYOB / Xero] Vendor connection orders are now sent to accounting integrations,
• [MYOB / Xero] Added a toggle to specify whether COGS should be sent as inclusive or exclusive of tax,
• [MYOB / Xero] Can now clear the supplier and customer mappings from the account integration setting pages,
• [MYOB] Forced all register closures to work through a queue to prevent duplicates due to MYOB’s API timing out but still succeeding,
• [Shop MyLocal] Barcode files are no longer directly downloaded, but instead emailed directly to Metcash from Shopfront,
• [OnTap Data] Added new integration with OnTap Data,
• [Developer] searchSale GraphQL route has been removed as per deprecation policy,
• [Developer] getIntegration GraphQL route has been removed as per deprecation policy,
• [Developer] product.usePriceLabel GraphQL field has been removed as per deprecation policy,
• [Developer] product.active GraphQL field has been removed as per deprecation policy,
• [Developer] paymentMethod.denominations GraphQL field has been removed as per deprecation policy,
• [Developer] Scopes can now be requested when authenticating an integration, allowing you to specify which permissions your integration will require (and prevent your application from losing the permissions)

Bug Fixes

• Printing a parked sale receipt from the parked sale sell screen options while another sale receipt is visible on the screen no longer results in two receipts being printed,
• Import products from CSV is no longer missing the first row in the preview,
• Merging customers without specifying their birthday no longer results in their birthday being the current date,
• Adding and removing shortcuts to the user’s quick menu is now more reliable,
• Customer price lists are now correctly updated when only the product details are modified,
• The current classification no longer displays in the assign classification page search box,
• The customer payment screen now correctly displays the customer’s credit terms when using a date format that is not YYYY-MM-DD,
• Fixed drag-and-drop importers from now accepting CSV files on Windows due to Windows providing an incorrect MIME type,
• Prevented refund reason from appearing multiple times for a single transaction,
• Changing a price list from cost + % to last cost + % when the percentage amount is zero no longer results in an error appearing,
• Prevented banner group promotions from reactivating deleted promotions when resent from the banner group source,
• Prevented numbers with commas in them from being pasted into the currency text boxes,
• [Shop MyLocal] Promotions that have concluded / started now correctly send product updates to prevent incorrect price from appearing on Shop MyLocal

Welcome to what’s new on Shopfront for January 2021! We’ve got a whole heap of changes that have been released this month due to holding the feature releases from last month.

Note: Some of these features are gradually rolling out to stores, all stores are expected to have received them by the end of next week.

Major Features

Clone Promotions

If you want to create a similar promotion to an already existing promotion without having to enter all the details back in, we’ve now made it simple by adding the ability to clone a promotion. Simply tick a single promotion on the promotions page and then press the Clone Promotion button which appears at the bottom. This will create an exact copy of the promotion with the name having (Copy) appended to it.

The ability to clone promotional criteria within a promotion will be coming later this year.

Exclude Promotional Categories From Sending Promotions to Integrations

If you’re integrated with an eCommerce store, whether it be your own custom store, the LMG eCommerce stores or Shop MyLocal you can now prevent some promotions from sending to it by excluding a promotional category from sending to the API.

To enable or disable sending promotions to integrations, you’ll need to go to the promotion categories page (Menu > Setup > Promotion Categories), from here you can either create a new promotion and enable or disable the Send promotions within this category to integrations toggle or if you want to edit an existing category, select Edit next to the category and then enable / disable the Include in Integrations toggle.

Note, custom API integrations can access and apply promotions directly so disabling this setting may not affect promotions appearing on your site – if you have any questions, contact your web developer. For web developers, this toggle directly affects the results of ProductType > barcodes > promotionPrice and outletPromotionPrice in the GraphQL API.

Filtering by Additional Information

Shopfront has always had the ability to add additional information to products which has previously been used to add information to your integrated website or to display on shelf tickets, however it didn’t have much use within Shopfront itself, now you’re able to use your additional information to help your staff find product through a combination of filters.

Firstly, you’re going to need to setup some additional information, and then add it to some products (which can be done at the bottom of the product edit page).

Once you’ve setup your additional information there are two places you can filter by it, the products page and the sell screen through a sales key.

To filter on the products page, simply open the page (Menu > Stock > Products), press Show Filters and then type or select which value you’d like to filter by and the products will be automatically filtered.

To filter on the sell screen via a sales key, you’ll first need to add the Search by additional information sale key, then on the sell screen tap the new key, select the field and then enter a value.

Customer Merge

Introducing the much requested feature, customer merging, this is the first is a series of releases we’ll be doing this year to allow merging between multiple objects (merging products will come out later this year). Performing a customer merge allows you to combine multiple customer’s details, sales, payments and more into a single customer.

It’s a slightly complex feature, so we’d suggest checking out our help article to learn how to use it.

Minimum / Maximum Order Values

If you want to prevent ordering from a supplier if the order doesn’t meet a minimum value or exceeds a maximum value, you can now set these values directly on the supplier edit page.

This doesn’t affect order generation in any way, but it will prevent orders from being sent if they’re outside the range specified (you can leave the value blank to ignore it).

Limit Reorder Quantity

Alongside minimum and maximum order values, we’ve also added the ability to limit the reorder quantity when generating orders from sales or reorder points (or both). This doesn’t prevent orders from sending with higher quantities, but it prevents Shopfront from suggesting higher quantities.

Minor Features

• Basket products have been reworked to be consistent throughout Shopfront, now inventory changes through stocktakes, invoices and transfers all affect the stock within the basket,
• Deleting a family via the classifications page now removes the classification instantly on the local device instead of waiting for a sync,
• Recovering a family from the trash now instantly restores the family on the local device instead of waiting for a sync,
• Inventory reports can now be grouped by Outlet,
• We’ve limited the sales history to the last 30 days by default to improve initial load time,
• The gift card code used to pay for a sale is now displayed in the sales history,
• Receipts can now display the base price per-line before discounts and savings are applied,
• Prevented blur on focus loss from appearing when an integrated payment method is used to prevent the focus loss screen from appearing when Linkly is used,
• Automatically received promotions from a banner group are now automatically deleted 14 days after the promotion ends,
• Unallocated customer payments now appear in sales payment reports,
• All routes are now lazy loaded to improve performance,
• Adding a classification to the everyday tickets now requests whether all products should be added or only products in stock should be added,
• You’ll now receive a notification when an email fails to send,
• Order references can now be added as a column to the sales reports when they’re unconsolidated,
• Large index buttons (Stock > More, Shelf Tickets, Miscellaneous Reports) can now be opened in new tabs,
• Purchase and transfer reports can now be filtered by vendor connections,
• Opened mail now appears in the mail log (presuming the receiver has images enabled),
• We’ve extended the number of supported decimal places when receiving invoices to five,
• [Shop MyLocal] Promotional prices are now sent on a per-outlet basis instead of the best promotional price for the Vendor,
• [Developer] Reports from the Reporting API can now be cached, this has also been applied to numerous pages in the POS

Bug Fixes

• Reloading an EFTPOS gift card product from a parked or cancelled sale now correctly goes through the EFTPOS refund flow,
• Failed payment methods with open cash drawer no longer open the cash drawer when the sale is completed,
• Applying a force sync from the server (e.g. when the settings are updated) and having an outstanding upload no longer causes a race condition resulting in the register closure being incorrect for the current register period,
• Numerous display issues have been fixed in multiple screens such as the product edit screen and the sales history screen,
• Tethered objects (like the calendar) no longer appear above the login screen,
• Large PDFs (8mb+) now correctly email and download,
• Shelf tickets added to the everyday tickets while in global mode now correctly save on the server,
• Shelf tickets exported with an additional information field of type date no longer fail to export,
• The touch numbers no longer appear over the discount reason box,
• Dropdown lists correctly close when clicking between them in the reports,
• Prevented promotions having mix criteria enabled and a criteria being set to more than,
• Products bulk created from the master database now create an initial inventory log entry,
• Invalid gTLD emails now appear as failed in the mail log instead of resulting in a failed upload,
• Reloading a parked sale which contains a nested component (package > package > component) no longer results in the sell screen showing an error,
• [Linkly] ANZ terminals no longer show transaction not allowed for cashout without a sale,
• [Linkly] Performing a sale while a settlement is currently performing no longer locks the integration dialog box,
• [Linkly] Sending a cancel request when an OK response is expected now correctly sends the cancel request,
• [Tyro] Going through the cancel sale multiple times over multiple payment attempts no longer causes Shopfront to cancel the payment without cancelling the payment on the terminal,
• [Linkly / Tyro] Integrated EFTPOS transactions now apply to the sale with the value returned from the terminal instead of the amount sent to the terminal,
• [ALM] Sending products with a variable case quantity (10-packs, cubes, etc) and have eight digit codes now correctly send to the ALM portal with the corrected quantities,
• [Developer] Sell screen options no longer flicker when swapping between tabs

Welcome to what’s new on Shopfront for December 2020! The end of the year is finally here and the Christmas / New Years trading period is upon us. We’ve kept releases to a minimum this month and are prepping to ramp back up in January.

Minor Features

• Returned invoices can now have fees and freight returned,
• We’ve improved how packages display discounts to be clearer with how the product’s total is affected

Bug Fixes

• Invoice number duplicate no longer appears when receiving stock without an order and the duplicate invoice has been cancelled,
• Price changes within the same cent work as expected,
• Receipts now correctly show the discount per product line when set to be visible instead of showing zero,
• Product view sales history Outlet filter for multi-stores correctly filters instead of appending the sales at the bottom of the list,
• Prevented duplicate inventory removal after retrieving a parked sale with a basket in it,
• Entering a decimal place (literally just “.”) into the swap cash dialog no longer causes a failed upload,
• Invalid reports can no longer be exported or printed,
• Invoice numbers no longer reset after paying for an old parked sale,
• Mixed required and optional promotions no longer cause an out of memory “Aw Snap” when cross promotion count is turned off,
• Product components discount as expected instead of locking the current price,
• Two criteria promotions with one criteria being an exact purchase and the second criteria being more than now correctly allow the more than criteria to apply,
• Prevented promotion calculation running before promotions have been fully indexed on page load

After nearly a full year of all stores being on Version 2 of Shopfront, we’re here ready to show you the next plans for Shopfront.

This should be used as a guide only, some features may end up with different functionality, be developed at a different time or completely dropped.

More information on each feature will be released closer to the individual feature’s release date.

Who doesn’t like a fresh coat of paint? Whether you are working a night-time, prefer higher-contrast colours, or just want a bit of a different look, dark mode will provide something for everyone.

Weighing products will have never been so easy, whilst Shopfront has had very basic support for scales in the past, we’re now officially adding support for a range of DataLogic scales connected via COM port.

We’re opening our integrations page to third-party developers so you’re able to easily connect with the applications you use the most to improve your efficiency. This will bring with it a new design for the integrations page, improved ability to see what data each integration has permission to use and an approval process to ensure integrations listed on the marketplace are of the highest quality.

The new security centre ensures your store is following best security practices and finding potential issues. It also comes with a whole new level of user tracking and accountability. The security centre will be open to several integrations to add additional functionality such as tracking potential card fraud through your eCommerce store.

You’ve asked and we’ve listened, we’re building an eCommerce platform due to have a beta release in early 2021. Coming with a range of features on release including multiple price handling, supporting multiple inventory locations and a deep integration with the POS system, it will be a fast, secure and easy to use platform that will take only minutes to get started with.

Hoping for a feature that’s not listed? Don’t stress, these are only a few of the features coming next year and we’ll have many more announcements to make throughout the year!

Welcome to what’s new on Shopfront for November 2020! We’ve been busy squashing bugs and working on a number of new features due to come out next year (we’ll have another blog post about that out shortly).

With the Christmas period coming up now’s a great time to use all of the features that Shopfront has to offer including:

• Setting up and selling gift cards,
• Enabling loyalty,
• Updating your customer facing display

Minor Features

• Outlets can be renamed from the Registers & Outlets page,
• The associate product dialog now supports searching via barcode,

Bug Fixes

• Exporting inventory at date to CSV no longer requires you to run the report first,
• External stocktaker import now shows the correctly calculated cost when the cost is not included in the imported file,
• The media centre now correctly overlays the product edit page when creating or editing a product from the order edit page,
• The login screen can now change receipt templates as expected,
• Fixed a bug which cleared a users password preventing them from logging in after editing the user,
• Rounding on customer payments rounds the correct way in customer statements,
• Assigning a lot (7,000+) of products to a classification no longer times out,
• Copying a product from the master database no longer appears with a syntax error in the page wizard for certain additional information setups,
• GST is now correctly displayed on the order edit page when receiving an invoice as WET excluded (it was always calculating correctly, just displaying incorrectly),
• Saving an order when using fees as a percentage and the invoice is set as tax excluded correctly reloads with correct tax,
• Large sales (1,000+ quantity) with cross promotion count turned off and multiple promotion options no longer take a long time to calculate,
• Adding a product to an order on the order page when the order has public or internal notes correctly scrolls the product into view,
• Prevented multiple large (120mb+) exported reports from taking up all of our server’s resources during generation resulting in 504 errors :'(,
• [Linkly / PC-EFTPOS] Reset shift totals button now correctly resets the shift totals instead of settling the terminal,
• [MYOB] We’ve extended the timeout to wait for MYOB’s response to three minutes due to some requests taking that long,
• [MYOB] The initial Shopfront contact for sales now gets created as expected,
• [Shop MyLocal] Revoking the integration correctly removes the payment methods and products

Welcome to what’s new on Shopfront for October 2020! We’ve got a short list of features and fixes this month because we’re full steam ahead on a secret project that we’ll have more details to release about during November.

Note, some of these changes are gradually rolling out. All stores will receive them by the end of next week.

Minor Features

• When something has been restored from the trash we now keep the screen at the same position instead of scrolling back to the top,
• A loading screen now appears while the favourite reports are first rendering,
• Exporting CSV and PDF versions of the Inventory at Date report no longer wait on the server to generate them and instead you’ll receive a notification,
• Improved speed of inventory log report for small date periods

Bug Fixes

• Per product discounts now appear correctly on receipts in complex promotion and discount combinations,
• Docket printing by tag (kitchen printing) correctly prints when the transaction doesn’t contain any tag,
• Failed payments no longer prevent a parked sale from being cancelled,
• Prevented parked sales from duplicating after they’re initially parked and then edited (by either adding a customer or adding more products),
• Performing sales offline and then force syncing the register no longer causes incorrect takings for the day,
• Price changes in the future now appear in the revision history when the price activates, not when the price was changed,
• Prevented advanced report from crashing due to eager optimisations,
• Completing a sale which had been parked on a different register and then reparked on the current register no longer fails to upload,
• Automatic banner group promotions that have been made inactive via the promotion index page no longer get automatically made active again after being updated by the banner group,
• Public notes no longer lose line breaks when emailing orders,
• Filtering the sales history by a gift card which has never existed now returns no sales instead of all sales,
• Promotions for a customer group now apply to the customer group instantly instead of after a sync,
• Additional information boolean toggles which default to true now correctly display as enabled,
• [Developer] Embedded API no longer times out when you’re not listening for an event (forcing the user to wait)

Welcome to what’s new on Shopfront for September 2020! Whilst we’ve got no major features this release, we’ve got a large number of minor features!

Minor Features

• Future prices now indicates when a product is inactive,
• Advanced stocktake now indicates when a product is inactive,
• Express promotions now shows a product information dialog when the product’s name is pressed,
• Dialog boxes have been redesigned for smaller screen (such as mobile phones),
• Public order notes now appear directly in the WYSIWYG editor rather than being embedded into the [order-table],
• Filters on the index pages (e.g. customers, products) are now hidden by default for small screens (mobile phones),
• Discounted and locked prices now show an unlocked price which is what the normal price would be had the price not been locked,
• Discounts are now based off the “unlocked” price (normal sell price including promotions but excluding discounts),
• Products on parked sales no longer send as discounts unless the “unlocked” price is different from the current, locked price,
• Whenever a product’s inventory has changed and the product edit page is open, you’ll now be presented with a dialog asking to confirm the inventory of the product,
• Revision history tables now highlight the differences between the “from” and “to” values (green is addition, red is removal and blue is modified),
• You can now return a transfer the same way you can return an invoice,
• The parked sales sell screen option now automatically refreshes when it receives a new parked sale,
• All POS routes are now loaded from the local cache by default which has dramatically improved the speed of opening a page in a new tab which has an ID in the URL,
• Price lists can now discount each item by a dollar amount,
• Scan rebates are now shown on the promotion view page,
• Cursor position now remains in the cash calculator after a routine sync when on the close register page,
• Everyday tickets has been reworked for small (mobile phone) screens,
• Refund reason is now available to be used in advanced reports,
• Login attempts now automatically time out after three seconds,
• Product import CSV will now be previewed before imported,
• Multiple filters can now be selected for the slow moving stock miscellaneous report,
• [Developer] Prices are now guaranteed to be ordered by quantity then price set

Bug Fixes

• Price changes applied to a family now appears in the revision history for all products, not just the one which the change occurred on,
• Discounts on the register closure view page are no longer being duplicated every time a discounted sale was parked,
• WYSIWYG editors show left-justified image padding correctly,
• Moving between two reports saved to the user quick menu now correctly loads the second report,
• Sales sent via Vendor Connect now correctly send whether the product was a case or single sold,
• Family pricing now checks if it should be recalculated after a promotion has been applied to part of the family,
• Loading a saved sales report filtered by customer now shows the correct customer name instead of just “Customer”,
• Prices updated from the stock list now appear in the revision history including all tax,
• Products created from the Master Database without modification now appear in the everyday tickets,
• Tax on freight and fees is now dependent upon supplier setting,
• Prevented duplicate products from appearing on transfers and orders received via Vendor Connect,
• Adjusting a price list override price by profit percentage now works as expected, previously it was overriding the price with the percentage specified,
• [Linkly] (PC-EFTPOS) transactions for some banks were able to be cancelled in Shopfront between the card being presented and Shopfront being informed of the transaction resulting in Shopfront believing the transaction had been fully cancelled, Shopfront now handles this correctly and continues the transaction rather than cancelling it,
• [MYOB] Prevented duplicate invoices being sent to MYOB due to MYOB’s API timing out but still processing the request

Welcome to what’s new on Shopfront for August 2020! This month is full of information display adjustments as well as some major performance improvements!

Performance and Memory Improvements

Over the course of this month we’ve had a focus on performance and memory related improvements and have made some significant gains.

First we looked at how our indexing works as we know that memory takes a large hit whenever that runs and it can run quite often (any modification to a product, customer, promotion or price list runs the reindexing process for the respective change). We keep an index to make searching fast and allows us to provide a dynamic search (such as searching from the middle of multiple different words).

To improve this we took a critical look at when we need to reindex our data and came up with a strategy to perform a “rolling” update which batches changes together.

After implementing the batched rolling update we then looked at which “browsing contexts” require the index and we’ve prevented a number of pages from performing a reindex until you’re back in a page which does require the index.

Both of these changes has lead to a large improvement in both memory usage and performance, but we’re not done yet.

Prior to this month our icons were loaded using a technology called SVG, this is a very common way to load icons and is great to do a number of transformations to the icons (such as masking and recolouring), however it comes at the cost of a small amount of memory per icon, when you have a small set of icons this memory usage is negligible, however Shopfront currently features over 350 icons so that memory usage stacked up. In order to combat this, we’ve moved our icons from SVG and instead made them into a “web font” which forces the icons to load like a normal font does. As soon as this was implemented we saw a huge reduction in memory usage.

Finally we looked at Shopfront as a whole, previously when you load Shopfront you load all of Shopfront, however you might just be in the register for the day so you don’t need the order modification or settings pages to be loaded in the background. Using a technique called “lazy loading” we have started moving a number of pages to load only when the page is visited. Now this is expected to come with a performance penalty of loading the page, however due to the way Shopfront was designed to work offline we precache all of the page data on your hard drive so you never see the page loading.

After finishing these performance and memory improvements we decided to measure them against some other popular applications and have found that our memory usage is now below Gmail, Jira, Zendesk and Facebook.

Minor Features

Whilst a major focus has been on overall Shopfront performance, we’ve made quite a few other minor adjustments, here are the key changes:

• You can now optionally specify tags to show revenue of when closing the register (customise this in the Registers & Outlets settings page),
• We’ve replaced the select dropdown component with a brand new lightweight version,
• The price calculation is now quicker when product quantities are greater than 100,000 by swapping to an approximate method rather than an exact price calculation,
• The product view page now shows the product’s status next to its name if it’s not active,
• Duplicate product dialog for express & advanced stocktakes as well as the order edit screen now shows if an included product is inactive,
• Sales history now defaults to the current Outlet you’re in if you’re a multi-store Vendor,
• The roles & permissions page now shows how many users belong in each role,
• A new permission to prevent users from clearing local data from within the POS was added,
• Reduced maximum amount of products and customers to display in the sell screen search to 300 to improve memory usage and loading time,
• The customer view page now shows the group it belongs to,
• Inactive products have been removed from the promotions sale key,
• More information has been added to the login news,
• Order reference is now an available column for advanced reports,
• The promotion view page now shows the Outlet(s) which the promotion is applied to,
• Advanced stocktake now allows entry of “0” as a quantity,
• When multiple of the same products are unconsolidated on the sell screen we now distribute the prices using the family price distribution rules,
• The sync no longer paginates the parked sales and instead returns them all at once resulting in a large performance improvement on pages after the first,
• Customer statements can now be run if you have the See Customers permission (previously you could only run them if you had the Modify Statements permission),
• Transferees can now store contact details and automatically email transfers,
• Vendor connections have gained the option to specify how the connection data should be received (either as an order / invoice or a transfer),
• Details of a invoice return are now able to be modified,
• [MYOB] The integration has been completely rewritten in TypeScript and now features better error recovery and a new validation system,
• [Developer] Viewing application history is now significantly faster

Bug Fixes

• Prevented multiple sell screens from being opened after removing a previous duplicate sell screen,
• Stocktaked products report was previously showing the current date for products that have never been stocktaked instead of “Never”,
• Fixed promotions endlessly reindexing resulting in a memory leak,
• Lines on orders which contain a different case quantity between the Shopfront product file and the order now correctly adjust the quantity when changing case quantity to one,
• Opening the browser when in global mode no longer forces register selection,
• Prevented payment of a sale while a product is being added when both hard drive and CPU are at 100%,
• Orders & Invoices now shows correct orders when navigated to when in global mode,
• Gift cards can now be removed after they have been added to a parked sale,
• Sales summary in product view now correctly shows all sales when in global mode,
• Performing a customer payment with a large number of sales no longer results in the rate limiter being hit,
• Logout is no longer forced after two hours from last login, instead it’s now two hours from last interaction with Shopfront

Welcome to what’s new on Shopfront for July 2020! It’s been a while since we’ve published one of these (November 2017 was the last time one was posted 😖).

This month we had a huge release with more than three months worth of development including a rewrite of our front-end system from JavaScript into TypeScript.

So without further ado, here’s what has recently been released for all customers on Shopfront.

Major Features

In-page help articles

You may have noticed this when we first appeared back in May, but it’s now been added to a large amount of screens throughout the POS – we’ve now embedded some of our support articles directly in to the page through the use of a help icon in the top right-hand corner.

Whenever you’re on a page which has a linked help article, you’ll be able to find out more information without even leaving the page. Clicking on the help article displays some relevant articles that might be of assistance to you.

We’ve also started to add more in-page help with any item that might need further explanation. We’ve started with the general settings page but we’re going to be adding them to more pages in the coming months.

Transfers and sales to other Shopfront Vendors

If you are transferring or selling stock to another store which also has Shopfront, you’re now able to connect the two Vendors together to automatically send and receive the stock without having to perform any manual entry.

To get started, both sides need to create a new “Vendor Connection”, the sender needs to provide the receiver with their displayed “Sender Code” which will be entered into the receivers “Receiving Code”. From there you can simply either sell stock to the connected customer or transfer stock from the Orders & Invoices page. Stock will be automatically matched between the two stores and the receiver will just have to verify the data is correct before accepting the order.

For more information, check out our dedicated help article or get in touch with our support team.

Redeveloped Additional Information

Our additional information has been redeveloped and redesigned with several new features being added including default values for fields and new field types (such as drop down lists) as well as a facelift.

This information can be accessed via the API, printed on tickets or displayed in several parts of Shopfront.

In the coming months we’ll also be adding several new features to the additional information such as being able to filter reports by additional fields and being able to use additional fields to search for products on the sell screen.

Media Centre Improvements

Whilst there is no visible change to the media centre, behind the scenes it has been significantly improved. Deleting and renaming both files and folders is now considerably faster as is moving between folders.

Along with the internal changes, we’ve also create a new “mini” Media Centre which is now available to use when editing anything with the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) text editor, such as editing the description of products.

The mini Media Centre allows you to quickly insert images into the WYSIWYG without having to worry about the image’s URL.

Shop MyLocal Integration

We’ve now released our Shop MyLocal integration as a beta version. Shop MyLocal allows IBA stores to sell popular products online with the prices coming directly from Shopfront and when a sale occurs, the sale automatically appears in Shopfront, preventing the need for data entry.

To find out more information about Shop MyLocal or to get started with it, contact your Business Development Manager.

Minor Features

Along with our major features, we also have made numerous improvements to Shopfront, we couldn’t list them all, but here are some of our favourites:

• Promotions can now be applied to multiple customer groups,
• New supplier option “Freight is included on supplier invoice” for use when receiving stock from a supplier that requires you to use an external freight company,
• Promotion calculation speed has now significantly improved when cross promotion count is turned off and a large amount of products exist in an active express promotion (one real world use case saw a reduction from 5.8 seconds to 0.2 seconds),
• Numerous information enhancements (e.g. more places now show the product’s status if it’s not active),
• Inventory at Date reports can now be exported as a PDF and CSV file, it can be printed and it can be searched,
• Many components on receipts can now have customisable padding,
• Product scanning in express stocktakes is now faster,
• You can now manually set a product to update it without using the future price time setting (go to the Utility Menu > Future Prices),
• Subject lines can now be predefined for customer statements,
• Orders sent via email to suppliers can now be sent as a PDF or CSV attachment (you can set this per supplier in the supplier’s edit page),
• Selling a product within a basket now shows that it was sold from a basket in the inventory log,
• We’ve replaced our code editor with a more lightweight version and a nicer colour scheme,
• We’ve also reduced the size of colour selector component and given it a facelift,
• [Developer] New Embedded API options to allow developers to plug into more of Shopfront’s user interface,
• [Developer] Embedded applications can now send messages between their embedded pages directly through the Embedded API,
• [Developer] All supplier details can be provided when creating a supplier instead of having to create and then edit the supplier,
• [Developer] Some POS resources (products, payment methods) can now be locked which prevents anyone from deleting the resource except for your integration,
• [Developer] Through the Embedded API you can now modify the current sale in process

Bugs

Our release also comes with numerous bug fixes, some of which are:

• Express stocktakes now show the inventory log history when a user that has been deleted previously changed the inventory,
• Customer account payments that were made in the future compared to the current statement period no longer affect the current statement period,
• Orders that have a decimal quantity for the received and sent quantities now save correctly instead of being rounded to the nearest whole number,
• Orders now always force the products to be put into the next sync after they’ve been sent and received,
• Fixed floating point calculation errors during promotion calculation when individual product quantities were above 150,
• Promotion Calculation Manager now correctly updates the current time to expire promotions without leaving the sell screen,
• Transfer history for products now shows transfers to transferees not just transfers to other Outlets
• Refund reason now appears when sale total is equal to zero,
• Push notifications are now more reliable,
• Bulk deleting several hundred promotions at once now works as expected,
• Promotions from banner groups now retain your changes instead of reverting when the promotions are updated,
• [MYOB Integration] Sending invoices to suppliers that have names which contain special characters now works as expected,
• [Linkly / PC-EFTPOS Integration] Prevented pressing cancel while terminal is performing a logon

Side Note

That’s it for this month, we’ll be aiming to continue to release these “What’s new on Shopfront” articles on a month-by-month basis towards the end of each month. We’re also going to be changing the way which deployments are handled in Shopfront by introducing release channels. To start with we’ll be releasing three different versions called Canary, Beta and Release. Most customers will remain on the Release version which is roughly equivalent with how we currently release our updates, however a subset of customers who want access to features faster will be moved onto Canary or Beta.

We’re planning on releasing a Canary update every week, a Beta update every fortnight and a normal Release every four to six weeks. We’ll start our new release process at some point about half-way through August. If you’d like to be involved in the Canary or Beta channel, send an email to our support team.