Spotlight
Google Shopping Automated Discounts / 'Dynamic Re-pricing'
Major new feature for ecommerce stores advertising on Google
Google has launched a major new feature to help improve online product sales by dynamically lowering the price of your products shown via Google Ads compared to your competitors. The new product price is displayed on Google's Search Engine Results Pages and once the ad is clicked the price is then automatically lowered on the website product page to match. The amount of discount given can be set as a percentage across all products, or with specific prices on a per product basis. The price offered by Google is honoured for 48 hours only.
The discount given is stored in Coupon Manager > Google Shopping Auto Discount tab for all resulting visits, not just successful sales. The side benefit is being able to see the level of discount that has been offered by Google which indicates how over-priced it considers your products to be on a given date. You can cross-reference this to views and conversion rates in the Top Products Report to adjust your price position further in the market, since you may be losing out on visits not coming via Google Ads.
This feature is available to our marketing clients. Requires cost data to be set up on product/variation records and Google Ads Tracking to be enabled (see 3645 below). Contact us for details.
Setup documents are available on Drive to support staff only: Google Shopping Automated Discounts.
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Free samples
Secure more sales by offering free samples to prospective customers as trials, matching up products etc. Mark a product as a free sample with free delivery and as an addon so it doesn't show up in latest products etc. Free samples are ignored in the minimum order value checks at checkout when ordered without other products. However, if you then add a £10 item to cart, that item triggers the minimum value check and prevents the checkout from allowing the order to go through until the minimum order level has been reached.
Admin > Product Manager > Add/Edit products > Is this a free sample? (under 'Is addon')
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You can also set the maximum number of free samples you allow per customer order via:
Admin > Site Settings > Prices & VAT > Free Samples > Max free samples
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Ecommerce & Tracking
Back in stock alerts for backorder items
Users buying backorder items can now be opted into alerts to find out when it'll be back in stock.
Contact us to enable this new feature.
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CMS & Admin
Modernised page urls
You can now set Page Manager pages to no longer add .html by default and ensure the urls are lower case in line with current practice by large sites.
Please note this currently only applies to Page Manager pages.
Admin > Site Settings > General > Miscellaneous > More modern page URLs.
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You will typically also want to have the previous .html URLS auto redirect to the new ones with this new setting:
Admin > Site Settings > General > Miscellaneous > Auto redirect to the modern URLs.
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Email notifications now warn if you have duplicates.
Email notifications work based on a single rule & group combination. If you have any duplicates here, the system will prompt you to resolve this so that the system knows which to use to send the notifications.
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Email Manager warning about slow SMTP
We allow sending via SMTP instead of our default mail server. However SMTP emails are slower which means when sending larger email campaigns it may result in the email not fully sending due to slowness. We now show a warning about this. We recommend using Mailgun to send these emails instead, or contact us and we can help set up an API for faster email sending through most other mail providers.
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Integrations
Google Ads conversion code *Required for the Google Shopping Automated Discounts feature
Increased integration with Google Ads you using Google ads conversion code complete with cart data for the thanks page via this new connect setting.
Admin > Connect > SEO > Google Ads Tracking > Tick: Enable Ads Conversion tracking on the thanks page?
Enter the "send_to" part of the code provided by Google in: Ads Conversion Tracking ID / "send_to"
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Unleashed order status updates now mark as "via Unleashed"
To help tell the difference between updates made by admins and those made by the system, we now append "via Unleashed" to these audits.
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The Orders API resource per item now contains the "extra_data" field to pass additional custom data to 3rd party integrations.
Such as for use with free samples to pass the name of the free sample item as this extra custom data.
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Retirement of old Universal Analytics integrations.
Google has now shut down the old UA analytics in favour of GA4. Read more here
Removed Setting: Connect > SEO > Analytics > Reporting Method
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Designer
Added Tiktok, Snapchat, Whatsapp & Vimeo social icons for site footers.
Admin > Connect > Social > find the new Tiktok, Snapchat, Whatsapp & Vimeo URL fields.
You may need to upgrade your site's footer/social-icons template to add these icons in.
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jQuery 3.7.1 upgrade
Minor upgrade to sites using the 3.x version of jquery to keep it up to date with latest security fixes.
Please note, many sites still use 1.x versions of jquery for customisations on pages and this should be upgraded. We have a site setting to enable 3.x in a preview for testing through your web pages and processes and then you can fully enable it if no issues are found or the issues found are resolved.
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Modules > you can now select fields to show in the "all" table to make the screen more useful.
Enable via Admin > modules > edit > fields
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Thumbnails showing "Image Unavailable" now properly send a 404 HTTP header.
This is to help ensure they can be easily found and not detected as any other sort of issue.
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