Blog

We are extremely proud to announce the release of our new nopCommerce plugin - the Nop Quick View.

The Nop Quick View makes your product catalog much easier and faster to navigate by providing a pop-up details view for every product on the category page. Just hover over the product and click the "Quick View" button.

The various product detail sections are all configurable from the administration of the plugin. You can choose what exactly to be shown on the Quick View window.

As with all our nopCommerce plugins, the Nop Quick View is open to modifications and has already been integrated in our free and premium nopCommerce themes. It supports single and multi variant products.

The Nop Quick View supports a Cloud Zoom and an Ajax Cart. With all this product information and functionality you customers will seldom have to go to the product details page, navigate back and forth and waste time choosing the products that they need. This dramatically improves your online store shopping experience resulting in better conversions and more sales.

Best of all, the Nop Quick View is included in the Nop Ultimate Plugin Collection, which provides 11 nopCommerce plugins for less than half the price. Do not also forget that our products are backed by the support of the one of the top nopCommerce teams - the Nop-Templates development team, who are setting the trends on the nopCommerce extensions market.

We have just finished developing our newest nopCommerce plugin. Until we put the finishing touches on the deployment and packaging, we have decided to upload it to our demo website and see if you can find out what it is. If you spot the new plugin, write in the comments below and we will grant you a free single domain license for it.

All customers with valid licenses for the Nop Ultimate Plugin Collection will receive the plugin for free. But this should not stop you from participating for the fun of it.

The plugin makes a huge difference to the customer shopping experience. So just go to the demo website and it should be easy to spot.

Video content is becoming more and more important to e-commerce. Online retailers are starting to realize the many benefits of having video on product pages among which are: new targeted search traffic, content sharing, site visitor engagement, increased customer loyalty and of course increased conversions.

The following video shows how you can easily add video to your product pages using the Nop Quick Tabs plugin. The Nop Quick Tabs are an excellent tool to manage your product content as it allows for sharing of the content between individual products, products in specific categories or products from specific manufacturers. If you are still not convinced about the benefits of having video on your nopCommerce store do check out the infographic by WebRocketVideo.com after the video.

These are the 21 steps, according to Invesp.com, which will assure you a killer product page on your e-commerce web site. We are proud to find out that the product pages of our nopCommerce themes actually support 19 out of the 21 features. If you guess the missing two, you will know what nopCommerce plugins we are currently working on.

Nopcommerce has an extensive showcase of beautifully crafted and highly functional web sites:

http://www.nopcommerce.com/showcaseliveshops.aspx

Half of these web sites use versions of nopCommerce prior to 2.x. But there is the other half, which has been updated recently with some quite nice additions using nopCommerce 2.x.

While checking the 2.x web sites, we were quite glad to find out that a few web sites were actually using our nopCommerce plugins and themes like Nop Ultimate Plugin Collection, Nop Ajax Filters, Nop Anywhere Sliders, Nop Categories Header Menu, Nop Jewelry Theme, etc.

We have decided to share these web sites as they are an excellent showcase for nopCommerce and Nop-Templates products. If you have or know a nopCommerce web site, which is at least as cool as these, drops us a line in the comments or share it on the nopCommerce show case page. If you are looking for more nopCommerce inspiration do not miss our clients page.

Now that nopCommerce 2.8 has a new default look (Default Clean theme) a lot of nopCommerce users must be wondering what is going to happen to the previous default nopCommerce theme, the well-known Dark Orange theme. After all there are quite a few nopCommerce web sites that are using it, yet it is no longer supported and will not be part of the future releases of nopCommerce.

Does this mean that every nopCommerce store owner running the default Dark Orange theme needs to upgrade the theme for themselves with every new release of nopCommerce? What about the non-techy store owners? Without a good knowledge of the system and a working knowledge of C# and MVC Razor this is actually not possible.

Fortunately we have an answer to this dilemma. From nopCommerce 2.8 onwards NopTemplates have been given the right by the nopCommerce team to support the Dark Orange theme through future versions of nopCommerce. Even better...we intend to improve the theme, just like we did with the nopClassic theme before (the nopClassic theme did drop out of nopCommerce in the same way) and release it for free.

So stay tuned for our nopCommerce themes release, which is coming this week!

NopCommerce 2.8 is out and here we are again with our usual digest of the more important features released with this new version.

First of all the release schedule of nopCommerce 2.8 was cut short by a month due to an important issue, which prevented SSL from working with nopCommerce on mobile devices. Therefore the nopCommerce team decided to wrap up the work on the 2.8 version and release it earlier than the announced release for the beginning of February. So first thing first, SSL now works on nopCommerce for mobile devices.

The pivot feature of the new 2.8 release is the new default theme, which has a more modern look than the previous DarkOrange theme. Our Nop-Templates development team was supposed to refactor the markup of the theme to make it more modern, more consistent, much easier to work with and more optimized. But due to the last minute change in plans this work item dropped out and is now due for the next version of nopCommerce.

One of the features in nopCommerce 2.8 that we like the most are ID-less urls for blog and news pages. So if we were to use nopCommerce 2.8 on Nop-Templates.com today, and we will very soon, our blog url instead of:

http://www.nop-templates.com/blog/34/whats-new-in-nopcommerce-28

would be

http://www.nop-templates.com/whats-new-in-nopcommerce-28

This is a great improvement for every nopCommerce web site with a proper SEO strategy. In our previous blog post about nopCommerce 2.7 we mentioned that it is obvious why keywords in urls are much better than meaningless ids. While this is true for product and category pages it is especially appropriate for content pages like blogs and news, which content is the most looked at by search engines. For more information on clean url design please visit this page from the google web master section.

But wait a second! What is going to happen to our previous url http://www.nop-templates.com/blog/34/whats-new-in-nopcommerce-28? Google has already cached it and users will click on it in their search results. Well the nopCommerce team (they are awesome by the way) have thought of that and implemented a 301 permanent redirects for all the links that contain ids, this includes product, category, blog and news links. So you do not even have to lift a finger to have your super clean nopCommerce urls working.

In nopCommerce 2.7 you would have seen a new tab in the administration of the products and categories, which looks likes this:

ACL in nopCommerce stands for Acess Control List and means that store owners can specify that only certain groups of users see the products in the public part of the web site. This was new in nopCommerce 2.7 and was implemented for products and categories. In nopCommerce 2.8 the ACL feature is also available for manufacturers. This is an extremely handy feature for scenarios where you would like to show different products to different users. For example you can have one set of products for distributors or whole sellers and one for normal clients.

Our favorite new features in nopCommerce 2.8 are the ones that we ourselves can use and the ones that will have real value to retailers using nopCommerce. The new "Color squares" attribute type is certainly one of these features. Now if your products have colors and you would like the customers to choose one of them you have a nice way of representing this to the users by using squares with the colors of your product. Customers can click on these color squares to select the color they need. This is one of the more modern and better user experience approaches, which is used mostly by the biggest online shops. It is also quite useful for filters, which contain Color attributes and as such will be supported by our Nop Ajax Filters.

Prior to nopCommerce 2.8 product specifications could be defined only via a set of specifications values. In other words if for example you are selling electrical products and wanted to have a specification like Power 150 (W) on a product you had to have a set of Watt values and choose one of the values in the set for every product:

Now imagine having to define a set of all the possible Power values of your products, which are pretty much arbitrary and could be hundreds and then having to map a value to each product separately. Fortunately in nopCommerce 2.8 store owners can specify custom values for specification attributes or in other words specify an arbitrary specification value  for each product without having to define a set of values before that.

Another much requested feature that larger nopCommerce stores will appreciate a lot in nopCommerce 2.8 is the ability to specify SKU, Manufacturer Part Number and GTIN for product attribute combinations. What this means is that if you are tracking product inventory by attribute combinations, for example you have separate stock quantity for each (green\size xl pair of jeans), now you can specify a different SKU, Manufacturer Part Number or GTIN for each of these attribute combinations.

As with every other release of nopCommerce there are numerous other small improvements, bug fixes and changes in the code to make development easier. For more information please read the release note.

Our nopCommerce 2.8 release is due this week starting from our nopCommerce plugins, which will be released today and followed by the release of our nopCommerce themes. So stay tuned for more nopCommerce 2.8 news!

We have long thought about creating a nopCommerce plugin, which would automatically create a Facebook shop out of your nopCommerce online store. And I got to tell you, we like the idea a lot! But developers like to create stuff for the sake of creating it and watching it work. Fortunately as a nopCommerce extensions vendor we have to go beyond this and make sure that before we develop it, a nopCommerce plugin would have real value to nopCommerce retailers. So we did some research on the subject of social and particularly Facebook commerce and were quite surprised to find out what we have to share with you next.

Although F-Commerce is considered one of the major e-commerce trends for the foreseeable future, it seems that Facebook might be losing on the e-commerce space after all. The previous year saw major retailers like Gap, Nordstorm, J.C. Penny, Gamestop close their Facebook shops, despite some of them having 3.5 million fans on their Facebook pages. So is the push for Facebook commerce too much too soon and howcome major brands were not able to leverage the social network to entice their millions of fans to buy on it.

Despite loving the idea of our nopCommerce Facebook shop plugin we started to suspect that a Facebook shop integration might not be what would bring nopCommerce closer to Facebook after all. How could this be?

Facebook was never designed for people to search and find products they might be interested in. It was designed for personal interaction. So having a Facebook shop as Forrester Research Analyst Sucharita Mulpuru put it: "it was like trying to sell stuff to people while they are hanging out with their friends at the bar." If you could segment friends on Facebook or posts by your interests then you could subscribe to feeds that will recommend products to you and for example follow fashion trends that you like. But at the moment this is impossible without all this being mixed up with day-to-day stuff expressed in photos, status updates, comments, etc.

Facebook was designed with social in mind but even as such its design and user experience is simply horrible. Despite using it for years, I myself can never navigate through it confidently as I might do with other web applications that I have used for only 5 minutes. Imagine trying to find a product and shop for it. With this huge over-complicated mess one might give it up before even starting.

And even if people decided to give a Facebook shop a go, they would still be shopping on an online store that just emulates the brand's regular e-shop. Why would they want to browser products and checkout withing Facebook when they can in reality do this on the official web store, which would most probably have a much better navigation, more features and ease of use?

Last but not least think about all the privacy implications of shopping on Facebook. Would you bestow your shopping preferences and history on a network that already knows too much about you and in quite a few cases has not been so kind as to keep it private? Would you trust them not to share your shopping habits with retailers and advertisers?

So while we have not given up on our idea to automate nopCommerce with Facebook to the benefit of the store owners, we are quite uncertain that a Facebook shop is the way to go. This leads us to the more general question of how Facebook should be leveraged by an online store in order to reach a wider audience and increase sales? Obvious answers is a fan page. But didn't you hear it? Your fan page posts are now being silenced. Only 10% of your audience are being shown to your posts.

One thing is for sure. There is no easy answer to our conundrum. While we try to figure it out your comments and suggestions are more than welcomed. Of course stick with us to find out more on the subject and mostly what ideas and plugins we come up with for integrating nopCommerce with Facebook.

We would like to say Happy New Year to everyone!

Wishing you lots of health and happiness and may you catch many good waves in the New Year, but mostly the ones you are passionate about!

We have had quite an exciting and successful 2012 and would like to celebrate this with a little quiz, which will grant all successful participants a free license to one of our nopCommerce plugins. Which nopCommerce plugin, it is up to you to decide.

So here it goes. Please answer in the comments below. An answer will be considered valid if submitted by January 5th 2013 12PM UTC - 5.

1. What was Amazon’s first sale?

1. The Hitchiker Guide to the Galaxy
2. A History of Philosophy, Vol. 1: Greece and Rome From the Pre-Socratics to Plotinus
3. Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought
4. Science of Animal Husbandry (6th Edition)

2. What was the first nopCommerce plugin sold on Nop-Templates.com?

1. Nop Anywhere Sliders
2. Nop Smart SEO
3. Nop Ajax Filters
4. Nop Quick Tabs

Have fun and once again a great New Year!