Welcome to what’s new on Shopfront for November 2022. With Christmas upcoming we’re winding down releases and instead focusing on system stability (we’re still hard at work over the Christmas period, with a large number of features and fixes being held back until January).
Note: Some of these changes are gradually rolling out to stores, some of the changes may not be received in your store until early next year
Minor Features
Added manual changes to loyalty points into the security centre,
Generally improved the styling of dark mode on most pages,
Account & Billing redesigned for a simpler flow and provides additional clarity of plans and add ons,
[Developer] Release new Idempotent requests functionality,
[Xero] Added ability for supplier invoices to be optionally sent to Xero as a draft
Bug Fixes
Prevented the creation of promotions which contain invalid Outlet IDs,
Prevented a duplicate sale being created when a sale starts uploading and a new page is opened at the same time,
Deleting an unlocked customer group through the UI now correctly deletes it from the server,
[ILG] Order error logs are now attempted to be retrieved multiple times before giving up after sending an order,
[Xero] Pressing the create new account button no longer loses your unsaved changes
Welcome to what’s new on Shopfront for October 2022. We’ve got a number of minor changes, a new feature for ILG customers.
November will come with a number of changes and will then slow down in December, instead having changes focused on reliability and performance.
Note: Some of these changes are gradually rolling out to stores, all stores are expected to have received them in the next couple of weeks.
Major Features
ILG Ordering
Ordering directly out of Shopfront to ILG has arrived! If you’ve got ILG integrated, you can start using it straight away. Simply head to Setup > Integrations and press the Settings button for the Independent Liquor Group integration and enable the Send ILG invoices setting.
Once enabled, whenever you press the Send button in Shopfront for an ILG order it will be automatically sent to the ILG warehouse, preventing the need for manually processing your order to ILG.
Minor Features
Customer group and price list columns added to the full customer export,
Improved how a number of pages look on small devices such as mobile phones,
Added returns to the product purchase history,
[Developer] Classification and supplier product assignment pages now trigger the PRODUCT_UPDATED webhook,
[Developer] Importing products from a CSV now triggers the PRODUCT_CREATED webhook,
[Developer] Importing customers from a CSV now triggers the CUSTOMER_CREATED webhook,
[Developer] Added new authentication method for the Embedded API,
[Developer] Sending orders to all suppliers now triggers the ORDER_SENT webhook for each order which gets created,
[ILG] Promotion names are now nicer,
[Xero] Credit notes for transferees now appear with the transferee set to the transferee’s name instead of Shopfront,
[ALM] Products which fail to send via i-orders due to not having a supplier code are now shown in the ALM log
Bug Fixes
Prevented empty menu categories from appearing due to having partial permissions,
Fixed normal price showing the discounted price when a receipt is reprinted from the sales history,
Adding a note to the register closure and then leaving and returning to the page no longer prevents you from submitting the register closure
Welcome to what’s new on Shopfront for September 2022. We’re rolling out a couple of major changes to stocktaking and price calculations to make your data even more accurate.
Note: Some of these changes are gradually rolling out to stores, all stores are expected to have received them in the next couple of weeks.
Major Features
Advanced Stocktake Confirmation
In order to clarify and guarantee correctness, Shopfront will now ask for confirmation on calculation of stock-on-hand when Shopfront cannot automatically determine the actual stock count with 100% accuracy.
Typically, these events occur when counting your stock live whilst doing sales, especially if stock is in multiple locations within your store.
If Shopfront believes any stock count may be incorrect, it will display the new confirmation screen after the stocktake is completed, but before the stocktake is applied.
You’ll still be able to view your variance and modify your stock count on the finalise screen before applying the stocktake.
Promotion and Price List Calculation taking into account country-specific price rules
Shopfront has introduced a new setting, Price Rounding Mode. This setting allows you to define how Shopfront should handle prices when the calculation would drop to more decimal places than the currency you sell in supports (e.g. price calculation would require three decimal places, but you sell only to two decimal places).
It features two options, Round and Redistribute. By default stores will run on Redistribute mode. For examples and further information, click on the question mark next to the setting in the General Setup.
Minor Features
Improved speed of Product Revision History Report,
Reduced the amount of times Shopfront accesses the hard drive when indexing to improve speed,
Added ID columns to sale reports,
Added new debug levels so less information is required to be logged unless specified,
Added ability to group by categories for inventory at date report,
[Developer] Unparking sales now fire a new SALE_UNPARKED webhook event
Bug Fixes
Prevented loyalty points appearing in sales reports when there is no customer attached to the sale,
Fixed colour of report dashboard pie graphs,
Prevented statements from displaying an Oh No page when no columns are enabled for the actions component,
Grouped user dashboard reports can now show and hide groupings,
Added ability to define advanced promotions as one or more when multiple criteria exist,
Gift Card creation source link is more precise for old sales,
Integrated payments which fail to reverse are no longer prevented from attempting to reverse again,
Deleting a product while the everyday tickets page is currently open (and the product is waiting to be printed) now shows a toast when you go to export the tickets
Welcome to what’s new on Shopfront for August 2022. We’ve got a large number of bug fixes and a couple of small features this month.
Note: Some of these changes are gradually rolling out to stores, all stores are expected to have received them in the next couple of weeks.
Minor Features
New sale key to increase the quantity of a product by the scanned barcode quantity,
Added ability to analyse all outlets when generating an order by reorder points,
Search indexing can now be customised to improve the memory usage and performance of the search, especially on lower-end devices or stores that contain 30,000+ customers or products
Bug Fixes
Generating an order by sales & reorder points while analysing all outlets no longer fails,
Adding a tag to products from the classifications page now correctly adds into the revision history,
Fixed some cost revisions not being used in inventory at date report,
Adding a gift card and a normal product to a sale which has a customer with a custom price list no longer creates a price calculation error,
Pressing next during the product creation wizard Which Product is it? step no longer skips the rest of the wizard because of a syntax error,
Times displayed in the product revision history miscellaneous report is now displayed in the local timezone instead of UTC,
Fixed formatting of PDF supplier orders,
Reports correctly calculate the sale total when running an unconsolidated product report when there were multiple lines of the same product on the sale (such as when performing sales with consolidate products turned off),
Prevented an error when receiving a Vendor Connection order when you don’t have a matching product,
Fixed a rounding issue when multiple loyalty point payment methods were added to a sale,
Prevented internally incrementing the gift card quantity through the use of the increment sale key,
Transfers received from a Vendor Connection can now create or associate temporary products,
Prevented a duplicate parked sale from appearing when unparking and parking the same sale while offline and the sync running before the sale could be uploaded,
Prevented negative values from being able to be entered into put cash in / take cash out dialogs through Manage Cash,
Shopfront no longer crashes when receiving a receipt event with no receipt text from an integrated EFTPOS provider,
[Linkly] MOTO with signature transactions no longer crash Shopfront when printing
Welcome to what’s new on Shopfront for the year of 2022 all the way from January until August! It has been quite a while since one of these has been written, but we’ve been hard at work improving Shopfront.
Welcome to what’s new on Shopfront for August 2021! It’s a light-on month for features and fixes with a large amount of development going towards large features coming out shortly.
Some of these features are still rolling out to stores and should become available within the next couple of weeks.
Minor Features
Added integration to Thirsty Camel’s Hump Club,
Added copy criteria button to the promotion edit page,
Rearranged a few tables in the security centre to look nicer on mobile devices
Bug Fixes
Prevented a gift card from being redeemed multiple times within the same sale,
When using the select all checkbox on the promotions page, we now validate that the promotions selected are for the current search, not a previous search (previously searching for “aug” would generate a search for “a”, “au” and then “aug” and could result in “aug” finishing before “a”),
Saving the register closure tags for a register will no longer remove the tags from other registers,
Importing customers via CSV now works as expected when specifying the customer_group_id column,
Reordered the promotional category dropdown on the promotion edit page to be alphabetical,
Revision history for price lists no longer show the fallback rule as an “unknown item”,
Prevented a race condition resulting in the customer display occasionally showing the previous sale when the cash drawer had to open to to a payment method requiring it,
Inventory for a previous date report can no longer be run for today’s date
Shopfront version 2 has had all stores on it for 18 months now and since then we’ve added a huge number of features, brand new and reimagined integrations, consistently improved the speed and improved reliability and now we’re ready to show you the next plans for Shopfront until the end of the year.
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.
eCommerce Store
Looking for another channel of sales? Shopfront’s currently building an eCommerce platform due for beta release shortly.
Fulfilment Interface
Alongside the eCommerce store, Shopfront is developing a new fulfilment interface which will allow any eCommerce store to easily send sales to Shopfront with the intention of them being fulfilled through the POS system (without having to develop their own user interface).
New Data Merges
Shopfront currently supports merging customers but will shortly be adding the highly requested functionality of merging suppliers and products.
Shopview & Enterprise Management
Managing stores on different domains? Want to run reports across multiple unconnected stores? Need a centralised source of truth for all of your stores?
That’s where Shopview comes in, Shopview is an external application that allows you to connect and manage multiple stores through a simple user interface.
Create advanced promotions to run across all of your stores, manage each stores product file in a centralised location, enforce policies across all stores and run reports on raw data fed from Shopfront.
New Integrations
We’re also constantly adding a number of new integrations into Shopfront (developed by both us and development partners). Recently we’ve added integrations to Thirsty Camel’s Hump Club and Milie ordering system, Myfoodlink has developed an integration to connect your Shopfront store through to their eCommerce platform and we’ve got a couple more new integrations coming this year including integrating with Zen Global’s loyalty system and upcoming integration with some delivery services.
Update 17th of August 2021: These changes have been rolled out to all Vendors, if you’re experiencing any issues, please get in touch with us.
We’re making some adjustments to the way Shopfront interacts with Xero, for most people using the integration you should not notice any changes.
What Changes are Being Made
Currently, the Shopfront to Xero integration works by connecting one Shopfront Vendor (which could have multiple Outlets) to a single Xero account (and through that account to a single Xero tenant).
This change will allow you to connect each Shopfront Outlet to a different Xero tenant (which can be across different Xero accounts).
Through this change, you won’t be required to have the same settings for each Outlet (although, we do recommend it if they are connected to the same Xero tenant).
Alongside this, we’re also bringing a new coat of paint to the settings page, with built in help and a cleaner interface to make configuring and mapping the integration easier.
Why We’re Making the Change
Throughout the years, we’ve had a number of store owners request the ability to connect a different Xero tenant to each Outlet, however we’ve always had the same principle as Xero where one business should be one Shopfront Vendor. However, more and more stores are coming onto Shopfront that wish to share product files, see inventory across locations and more but also have multiple owners and account for each location separately.
When the Changes Will Happen
This change is currently being rolled out to all stores and should be completed by early next week.
What you Need to do
If you’re a Vendor with only a single Outlet, no changes will be required and your integration will continue to work as per-normal.
If you’re a Vendor with multiple Outlets, you might want to change to using our new multi-tenant support. If you do, all that you need to do is go to your Xero integration settings once the changes have been rolled out and change the configuration of each Outlet like you would currently do with all Outlets.
What About the MYOB Integration
Currently this change is exclusive to the Xero integration as there are significantly more uses of the Xero integration and the multi-tenant model of Xero makes it simple to connect multiple Outlets whereas MYOB’s company-file model is a bit more complex.
Whilst there are no current plans to make a similar change, we will consider doing so in the future.
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
