With the “Stores / Marketplace - Ecommerce Plugin” installed on your SocialEngine website, you can have a great Social Commerce system set up, with numerous monetization opportunities. We’ve been working hard lately on exciting new features in this plugin, which make it a more powerful and robust ecommerce platform. The following new functionalities will not only enhance this plugin’s usability, but will also increase sales and traffic on your website:

 

1. New "Cash on Delivery" payment option: If enabled, buyers will now be able to choose cash on delivery payment option while placing their order on your website, thus enabling them to pay for their ordered products at the time of product delivery instead of having to pay upfront.

 

2. New Import / Export Functionality for Products: This enables store admins to easily import products into their store via CSV files. This is available in the "Import Products" section of Store Dashboard. It enables store owners to quickly get their stores set up and rolling. Store admins can also export selected products from the store dashboard.

 

3. Integration with "Advanced Events Plugin": If you have the robust "Advanced Events Plugin" on your website, then you can have events for Stores on your website. After enabling this integration, Store Admins will be able to create events for their stores from the "Apps" section of their Store dashboard.

 

4. New "Product History" setting enables a store admin to track sale records for a particular product. The records showing information of Buyer, Order, Seller, etc available in the "History" tab of Product Dashboard help store admins to see trends for sales of specific products.

 

5. New "Free Order" functionality: Now store owners can make their valuable buyers feel special with free gifts ($0 price). This can be done on special occasions and will increase buyers' faith and interest in their store.
Store admins can create products with $0 price, which will be redeemed by buyers for free while completing their order.

 

6. Automatic Store Creation upon signup for users of selected subscription plans: The Subscriptions feature of SocialEngine is a great monetization tool for websites. You can now club this with stores, and provide additional benefits with selected subscription plans by auto-creating stores for users when they sign-up on the website with those subscription plans. These stores will be created in draft mode and store owners will be able to configure / manage them later after signing-up. Site Admin can map Store Packages with Subscription Plans to have a store of related package auto-created when a user signs-up with a subscription plan.

 

7. "Direct Payment" functionality: Enables site admin to choose the type of payment flow to store owners for orders on the website:

•   •  Direct Payment (to store admins): Payments for orders will be directly sent to the store owners (New functionality).
•   •  Payment to Site Account: Payments for orders will be first sent to the website’s configured gateway accounts (to the site admin), and the site admin will later be able to disburse payments to store owners (Existing functionality).

 

8. Bundled Products with all product types: Earlier bundled products could only be made with Simple Products. With this enhancement, Bundled Products can be created with all product types: Simple Product, Configurable Product, Downloadable Product and Virtual Product.

 

9. Product Sections within Stores: Though products can be categorized based on site-wide product categories, this functionality enables store owners to classify their products into sections. Each store can have its own sections for its products depending on how it wants its customers to perceive grouping of its products.

•   •  Example: Your website might have categories for clothes / apparels like: Dresses, Tops, Shoes, etc, and a Store Owner might want to classify its products based on occasions like weddings, etc, in addition to assigning site-wide categories to them.
•   •  Sections will be visible within the stores. New "Store Sections" widget for highlighting sections of store on Store Profile page.
•   •  Sections can be managed from "Manage Sections" part of Store Dashboard.

 

10. Making "Products Main Photo" optional: A "Products Main Photo" setting allows site admin to make Main Photo of Products a mandatory or optional field. This setting is available in Admin > Global Settings > Products section.

 

11. Multilingual Support for product details: If your site is in multiple languages, then this  feature will be very useful for you. It allows store admins / site admin to enter product title, description and overview in the various languages supported by the website.

 

12. New "Copy Product" feature enables quick creation of new products which are similar to existing products. It allows you / store admins to have replicas of their selected products, which can then be modified from the "Copy Product Info" page.
A "Copy" option available in "Manage Products" section of store dashboard allows this.

 

13. VAT for Store Products: You can now enable VAT for products on your site from the Global Settings admin section. You can also choose who will be able to configure VAT on your site:

•   •  Site Administrator: If enabled, site admin will be able to configure VAT from "Taxes" section in the administration.
•   •  Store Owners: If enabled, store owners will be able to configure VAT from the "Taxes" section of their Store's Dashboard.

Note: In this case store owners and site administrator will not be able to add any other taxes for the products and all other pre-existing taxes will be disabled.

 

14. Terms & Conditions for stores: You can now allow store owners on your site to add terms & conditions for their stores from the "Terms & Conditions" section of their Store Dashboard. Buyers will have to confirm to these conditions before completing the final checkout of their products.

 

15. Locale based Currency Symbol Display to users: Users will now be shown the currency symbol for product prices according to their "Locale" setting.

 

16. Store Coupons: Store owners can now create discount coupons for their store's products, which will be redeemable by buyers at order checkout. Not only will this enable stores to attract new customers, but will also allow them to offer special deals to your website's users.  
Every coupon can have:
   ~ Coupon Code
   ~ Start Date and End Date
   ~ Minimum Purchase Amount 
   ~ Minimum Product Quantity    
   ~ Coupon URL
        etc.
Site admin can enable / disable various coupon settings.

 

Note: To get these enhancements on your website, please upgrade this plugin on your site to its latest version available in your SocialEngineAddOns Client Area.

 

Clients who have subscribed to our "Basic" or "Plus" subscription plans can send us a request for upgrading this plugin on their website by creating a new Support Ticket from their SocialEngineAddOns Client Area. If you have not yet subscribed to any of our plans, then you can do so from here to avail the numerous benefits that come with them.

 

You can check out our Social Commerce Demo over here: http://socialcommerce.socialengineaddons.com/ . We also offer a Product Kit: "Stores / Marketplace - Ecommerce Product Kit" which provides you a great discount of $77.