We are pleased to announce that our long-awaited new Admin panel built in DHTML (HTML5 + CSS + JavaScript) is now open for public beta testing. You can use this link to access the new Seller Admin beta:

1https://www.e-junkie.com/ej/admin/1



This also includes a new Admin panel for Affiliates; you can use this link to access the new Affiliates Admin beta:

https://www.e-junkie.com/ej/admin/?section=affiliates&rs=af#affiliates



PLEASE report any bugs you may find as you use and explore the new Admin -- you can submit a message via the 'Report bugs here' link in the new Admin or the 'contact' link at the top of our site, or just email us directly. We will be squashing any reported bugs on an ongoing basis along with other minor improvements during the beta. When reporting a bug, please describe the steps you took up to the point where things didn't work or look quite right, and if you email us directly please also mention which browser you were using.



During this beta release, our legacy Flash-based Admin panel will remain the primary, default interface for all users. As such, the navigation links in our site header (e.g. "seller admin . logout" etc.) will return you to the legacy Flash admin for now. To get back to the new Admin beta, just use the access link I provided above -- in fact, you may want to bookmark that link now for convenience.



Since the new Admin is a drop-in replacement for our legacy Flash Admin, they will share the same login session, so you should be able to switch between them freely; however, it may be advisable to force-refresh your browser whenever you switch from one version to the other -- to do this, hold the Ctrl key (on PC) or Shift (on Mac) while you click reload/refresh. In the unlikely event the new Admin somehow messes up a setting, you should be able to fix it in the legacy Flash Admin (and please report any such issue as a bug!).



While we prefer to receive all bug reports via email, if you have any other general questions or comments about the new Admin, please feel free to post them below. Thanks to all the developers who contributed to this project, and thanks to you, our loyal clientele, for your considerable patience and understanding while we put in the hard work and surmounted the many obstacles and delays towards making this new interface possible.

RELEASE NOTES:



We've been saving major new features and functionality for a later release just to avoid "feature creep" and get this first version launched as soon as possible, but you will notice numerous improvements in the new Admin, the most significant of which I will outline below.



• Profile and Preferences settings have been rearranged slightly and consolidated from three into just two screens:

- Edit Profile: now focused on basic account details and payment account credentials, so any of those settings formerly in Payment Preferences now reside here, and a couple optional settings formerly in Edit Profile have moved to Edit Preferences (see below);

- Edit Preferences: now consolidates the old Account Preferences with any remaining old Payment Preferences that hadn't been moved to Edit Profile, along with optional settings relocated from Edit Profile (namely Upload Your Logo and E-junkie Shop URL). Here you can also specify/edit your E-junkie Forum Nickname and Web Site URL -- the latter will eventually work with a new Client List page we'll be creating, where your Display Name will be listed as a clickable link to your Web Site URL within an alphabetical list of our clientele.



• Product settings are now consolidated into one large screen, rather than a series of sequential screens; as such, whenever an optional setting is enabled (e.g. Shipping & Buyer's Address), we can now show related sub-settings directly adjacent to that, rather than having them all separate and disjointed.

- You can now simply un-check Product Thank-you Email to disable this message;

- "Package files from other products/affect their inventory" has been relabeled to the more self-apparent "Bundle Other Products";

- Post-checkout Integration settings formerly labeled as "Send transaction data to a URL" and "Payment Variable Information URL" have been relabled to the more self-apparent "Custom/Third-party Integration" and "Product Notification URL" respectively.



• Shipping settings are also now consolidated into one large screen, rather than two sequential screens; at present, we still don't have a way to let you edit existing shipping rules, but we're planning to add that functionality as soon as possible.



• Discount settings have been slightly rearranged to be more intuitive and prevent common pitfalls -- e.g., for existing discounts the Discount Name field now becomes read-only.

- To clone an existing discount, select it from the Existing Discounts menu, then reselect Add New Discount, and you'll find the last-loaded settings are retained, except for the Discount Name which must be unique for each Discount;

- You can now create item-specific % discounts (handy for items using Variants or "Let buyer edit price").



• View/Edit/Delete Products now allows you to Clone an existing product; this proceeds to the Add Product screen with the selected existing product's settings pre-loaded as defaults for that new product, which you can then modify as you wish before clicking Submit to actually create the new product.



• Product listings in E-junkie Shops/Marketplace can now be added/edited only via View/Edit/Delete Products; this makes it more self-evident that E-junkie Shop listings are an optional feature for sellers who don't have their own Web site to sell from (rather than a necessary step in setting up a product to sell at all).



• Affiliate Program Settings now consolidates Common and product-specific settings together in one screen; just select a product from the menu here to view/edit its affiliate settings (if any).



• Buyer Group email lists for sending Updates/Newsletters can now be viewed/edited directly via a link provided in Seller Admin.



• Get Buy Now/Cart Button Codes:

- Now lets you select any product on-the-fly and generates code for the selected product accordingly. Simply clicking inside the codes field automatically expands to show all the code and Selects All right away, so you can just copy and paste from there;

- We now provide button code with protocol-relative src= URLs which start with just // rather than http:// or https:// -- these will work fine with any existing codes in your page, so there's no need to replace those; however, this URL format allows our buttons and cart script to load securely within secure pages using https:// (preventing "mixed content" issues in such cases) and not in regular pages using http://, without requiring you to alter the button code at all (BTW, checkout pages are the only ones that strictly need to load securely to protect sensitive buyer data, and we'll continue taking care of that automatically as usual);

- The new Admin no longer provides our legacy "PayPal Cart" version of button codes, as those have long been deprecated and no longer work properly in many regards due to changes at PayPal's end that we have been unable to work around. We recommend replacing any PayPal Cart button codes in your site with the standard E-junkie Shopping Cart codes, which support PayPal checkout along with all the rest of our standard features.



Browser support notes:



• The new Admin has been tested to work fine in Android 3.x and up, as well as mobile Firefox in any version of Android; however, it does not yet work in the Android 1.x or 2.x default Browser app or its derivatives (e.g. Dolphin), but we're working on that.



• Internet Explorer 7 and below have not been tested and may not work in at least some regards. We have tested functionality down to IE8 as the last IE version released for Windows XP (even though Microsoft end-of-lifed WinXP earlier this spring). For security reasons we urge diehard WinXP users to avoid using IE8 in general at all anymore, and we strongly recommend adopting Firefox or Google Chrome instead.

We haven't changed anything about the shopping cart; however, on mobile devices the cart has always displayed in "fallback" mode by opening a popup window/tab instead of displaying the overlay cart "inside" your own page. This makes the best use of available mobile screen space and ensures that users can use their touchscreen pinch/swipe zoom/pan functions. I've proposed to Development some improvements to this cart's responsive layout behavior, so hopefully they can review and implement that proposal soon.



If you're also seeing that fallback/popup cart on your site even on a regular computer, make sure to copy your View Cart code in full directly from Seller Admin and paste at least one copy of that code into every page that has any number of Cart buttons. This adds some javascript to your page that manages the overlay-style cart display "inside" your page, so if that code is missing/garbled, or if the overlay cart can't work for any other reason (e.g., javascript disabled in the buyer's browser), the buttons should still work in fallback mode by opening the popup cart window/tab.

The new Admin is now providing button code with "protocol-relative" src= URLs (for loading button images and the box.js cart script) that start with just // rather than http:// or https://, so they will pick up the http or https protocol from your own page, once it's live.



This prevents "mixed content" errors/blockages when the button code is pasted into a secure-encrypted (https://) page, without requiring sellers to modify the button code manually in such cases, and without the potential performance penalties of just providing button code with hardcoded https:// URLs to everyone as standard.



Aside from all this, E-junkie cart can only work properly on a live Web page viewed in an actual Web browser. If you're viewing a local copy of the page on your own hard drive and/or in the "preview" mode of your Web page design software, the protocol-relative URLs may not work, but they will work fine once you upload or publish the page to your live site.

As few bugs, and none serious, have been reported to us since we first posted this announcement last week, we've updated the yellow notification box in our site header to announce the open beta more broadly and provide a link to access it more conveniently on-demand.



BTW, a note about the new Admin's "responsive design" (a buzzword referring to layouts that adapt to suit various screen sizes):



The current responsive behavior for the new Admin is temporarily a bit of a compromise, as our overall site layout (common header/footer and main content area) still isn't responsive, so we've done our best to make the new Admin panels as responsive as possible within that non-responsive, fixed-width page layout. That's why you may notice the site header/footers running off the side of your smartphone screen, while the actual Admin panels between that header/footer should fit within your screen's width. We've also been laying groundwork to prepare our legacy site layout for a transition to overall responsive behavior and ultimately a major layout/style renovation.

While we may occasionally improve the Web-based Transaction Log display, we haven't done so in quite some time, and that does NOT affect the format of your downloaded log files, which we keep consistent to remain compatible with whatever legacy data parsing tools our clientele may be using to process those files.



On the very rare occasion we might alter the downloaded log file format (which we haven't done in years), we would only ever add new columns to the far right end after all prior existing columns, as legacy data parsing tools that expect the prior format would typically ignore any extra columns tacked on at the end. The last new column we added years ago was for Buyer Country, and we hadn't received any reports of problems with that at the time; if your data parser can't handle this for some reason, you can edit the file in a spreadsheet program to delete that column before feeding the file to your parser.



Card-based direct payments have always stored more billing information in our Transaction Logs than PayPal account-based checkouts (PayPal Standard or Express Checkout). This extra info includes the buyer's full Billing Address, Phone Number (if entered), Card Type, and ONLY the last 4 digits of their card number (which poses no risk); the downloaded log file format breaks these out into separate fields/columns, which are always present in the file even when they are blank (e.g. for PayPal account-based checkouts).

The new Admin Beta round is going very well so far, so we anticipate we'll probably feel safe enough to roll it out for all users, replacing our legacy Flash Admin as the new default interface for everyone, as soon as the New Year.



We could probably even do it right now, but we don't want to impose a new Admin panel on everyone during the busiest shopping season of the year. Those who want to use it right away can go ahead and do so via the Beta link, and this gives everyone ample time to explore and get acquainted with it at their own pace before we make the formal switch over.

When adding a new product-specific discount, you would select Discount Applies To: Item Unit Price. This will reveal another menu where you can select the item to discount.