When a shopper orders six packs of 250 business cards and three packs of 500 each, StoreFront would previously always quote a total price for (6×250 + 3×500) cards. Now it can instead offer the discount rate for 3000 cards, which may be lower. The same also applies to posters, for which a shopper can be quoted the degressive square meter pricing for all of the prints ordered, even though the order may consist of 20 different items that all happen to be printed on the same substrate.

Cross-item pricing will be applied on items within a single order, provided

• the items are based on the same product template
• that product template has the ‘Cross-Item Pricing’ option activated
• the same media is used for these items
• there are no options selected that prevent one or more items from being included in the price calculation. For example: there may be a ‘lamination’ option and you don’t want items that get laminated to be included in the bulk price recalculation.

When cross-item pricing is applied

• the price per quantity is distributed across the entire list of items. For example: you order 8 packs of 250 cards. A pack of 250 cards costs 10 euro but 2000 cards cost 60 euro. On the order summary and all other reporting each pack of 250 cards will have a price of 7.5 euro.
• You can configure if the setup fee is applied to each separate item or if it is only applied once to the entire group of items.

Activating cross-item pricing is done in the Product Templates > Pricing window. Once the option is activated you can also configure how setup costs will be handled. These settings are applied to all the products based on this template.

When cross-item pricing is activated, you may want to prevent its use when certain options are activated within an order. In the Product Templates > Product Options window there is a setting ‘No Cross-Item Pricing if values differ’ that allows you to specify that any order items for which that option is activated or its value differs from the other items should not be included in the price recalculation.

StoreFront allows shoppers to define an order reference code or POC (purchase order code) during checkout. This is often used to assign a cost center or department to each order. Previously such an order reference code had to be entered in a text field, allowing customers to type whatever they wanted. Now you can present buyers with a predefined list from which they have to choose.

Defining the list is done in the new Advanced > Predefined Values window. You need to prepare a text file with each line containing one of the allowed values. After importing that file and saving the list, the StoreFront window will display the available values. For multilingual stores separate files can be imported per language.

Activating the list is done in the Stores > General window. Select ‘Required – Predefined List’ from the drop-down menu and then select the list you just created.

From now on shoppers will have to choose from that list during checkout. Since lists can be long, there is a filter field that allows them to enter part of the value they are looking for, shortening the list of available options.

The selected value is listed in the order confirmation e-mail, order details page, order item details page, package slip, invoice, Excel order summary and the JDF order data sent to the workflow or MIS system.

Products can have options, but until now these were always simple selections that shoppers needed to make. Now there is a ‘Free text field’ option that allows them to enter a line of text as a product option. This can be handy for

• simple customizations, such as engraving pens. Users can type their name or company name, which will be engraved on each pen they order.
• adding an order reference code to each product in an order, instead of having a single purchase order code for the entire order.
• adding special instructions to an order.

Adding a free text field is done in the Product Templates > Product Options window. The text field can be made mandatory and instead of allowing shoppers to enter text, you can also allow them to pick a predefined value from a drop-down menu.

Since this is a product option, its price should be defined in the Pricing window, even if the use of the option does not affect the product cost. The text field will show up in the order box on the product page. The value entered is also listed in the order confirmation email, order item details page, Excel order summary and the JDF order data sent to the workflow or MIS system.

As soon as a shopper adds an item to the cart, StoreFront always used to jump to the shopping cart. This was the way many e-commerce solutions used to work and it is still handy if the bulk of orders contain just a single product. For large orders it is, however, clunky that you need to click the ‘Continue shopping’ link and navigate to the product you want to order, especially if it is the same product you already added to the cart.

StoreFront 5.3 allows you to configure this behavior using the ‘Add-to-cart flow’ option in Stores > General.

• The default setting is ‘Show cart’ which is how StoreFront always used to work.
• The ‘Show Home Page’ option takes shoppers to the home page of the store each time a product is added to the cart. This is handy if most orders consist of a mix of different products.
• ‘Stay on Product page’ is useful if most buyers repeatedly order the same product. Each time they add a product to the cart, StoreFront remains on that product page, allowing them to put the next variant in their cart. A confirmation window pops up every time a product is added to the cart.

With the two latter options shoppers must click the cart icon in the top right corner of the browser window to go to the cart and start the checkout process.

By default, microstores inherit the transport options of the main store they are based on. Previously you could not change that list. With StoreFront 5.3 the Stores > Shipping window is also editable for microstores.

Some StoreFront users have a very large library of product templates. In such large lists it can be time consuming to manage or find templates. This is now easier because product templates can be grouped into categories. These categories can then be used to sort or filter the product template list.

Creating product template categories and assigning them to product templates is done in the Product Templates > General window. Existing categories can be selected from the drop-down menu. To create new categories, click the pencil icon and add them in the window that pops up.

A product kit (available from MallPack Silver onward) is a group of two or more products that shoppers can buy in one go. It is a surprisingly popular function so based on customer feedback this product type has been reworked.

• Previously kits could contain up to 16 products. This has been extended to 32. We do however recommend to keep kits as simple as possible. Sometimes it is better to bundle a group of products in two or more kits, instead of trying to cram everything into a single complex kit that may slow down order processing.
• Sometimes kits contain products that require no user interaction for ordering. The shopper isn’t asked to select a quantity, does not need to pick any options and doesn’t need to upload files or customize a layout. Previously the shopper always needed to review such products in the kit ordering wizard, which can be a time-consuming and pointless hassle. In the StoreFront 5.3 wizard to define a new product kit, there is now a checkbox labelled ‘Skip specification by the customer for products with known content’. If this option is activated, shoppers do not need to review products that do not require any choices to be made. This lowers the time needed to add the product kit to the cart.

An update of the Online Editor is still undergoing testing and will be released in an upcoming StoreFront 5.3 update.

StoreFront 5.1 introduced multi-version support for on-demand and non-printed products. With this update digital products can also be offered in multiple versions. This is handy for multi-lingual manuals or datasheets that you offer in a store as digital downloads. This option is only available from MallPack Silver onward.

When a print job is described using JDF, a Production Intent tag can indicate if that job is intended to be produced using an offset, digital or inkjet press. Some systems use that information for job processing or planning purposes. StoreFront uses JDF to forward order information to workflow or MIS systems. Version 5.3 can now include this Production Intent information. This is not yet relevant for the current Apogee or Asanti workflow systems but may be useful when the order information is sent to other systems or gets processed by PrintSphere AutoPilot. You can define the JDF ProductionIntent by selecting a Print Process option in the Product Template > Production window. By default, the behavior remains as it was before and no ProductionIntent will be included in the JDF.

Product templates for which no ProductionIntent is defined make use of the ProductionIntent that is selected in the  Advanced > Production Settings > Prepress Settings window.

In previous StoreFront releases very long image file names or e-mail addresses could sometimes lead to reorders for customizable products failing. StoreFront 5.3 is more tolerant when it comes to using long names but we still recommend to avoid very long image file names.

Some of the changes and new features in this release require action by a printer administrator:

• We recommend to use the HTML5-based Online Editor instead of the Flash-based version for all new customizable products. When revising existing documents, please convert them for use with the HTML5 Online Editor.
• Replace all Flash-based banners with HTML5-based sliders. Support for Flash will be removed in a future upgrade.