Shipping Calculator & Discounts: New & Upgraded Features!

[E-junkie_Guru]

We are pleased to announce the rollout and immediate availability of significant upgrades to our Shipping Calculator and Discount features!



These will enhance and expand our functionality without replacing any old functions, so you should NOT need to do anything at all to keep your setup working the way it already was prior to today. These upgrades simply give you some additional options and some easier and more flexible configuration methods.



Until we finish writing new, detailed documentation for these features in our help pages, this summary will give you an overview of what's new and how to use it:



SHIPPING CALCULATOR:

This feature now has TWO screens for configuration. When you go to Seller Admin > Cart Shipping Settings, the first screen you see is mostly similar to our old Shipping settings. You can now select whether all your Shipping-related Weight settings will be treated as Ounces or Grams, and you can now define Handling either as a flat amount or as a "percentage boost" on top of your other Shipping charges (so e.g. Handling of 10% would take your other applicable Shipping charges and multiply those by 1.10 to reach your final shipping charge applied to any order). Domestic/International custom rates have now MOVED to the second screen of Shipping settings; click NEXT to proceed to the second screen.



On the second screen of Shipping settings, you can now define various Shipping Rules! You can configure these as automatic selections triggered by custom thresholds of order quantity/total/weight/currency, or you can add various methods for your buyers to choose -- i.e., you can now give your buyers a choice of standard/express/etc. shipping, right inside their shopping cart before they proceed to checkout.



We have added support for weight-and-destination-based live rate lookups using USPS Parcel Post, Media/Priority/Express Mail, and (drumroll please)... UPS Ground! When you configure a Shipping Rule and click Submit, that rule gets saved to your Existing Shipping Rules menu; select a Rule from the menu and click Edit to view/change its settings, or click Delete to remove the selected Rule. If a buyer's cart order qualifies for more than one Rule/Method, they will be shown a menu in their cart to select their preference.



DISCOUNTS:

All Discounts are now configured in a common screen at Seller Admin > Cart Discounts & Gift Coupons. Item-specific Discounts are no longer configured in the settings of individual products. When configuring a Discount, you can now select whether the Discount settings apply to a whole-cart order vs. applying only to one particular product. This means you can now configure "volume discounts" based on the quantity/cost of individual items in the cart.



As before, Buy Now buttons can only use Item-specific Discount Codes the buyer would enter to take a flat amount off the per-unit price of that item. Buy Now buttons will not work with common Cart Discounts applied to "All Cart Items", nor will they work with Item-specific Discounts that use the new quantity/cost conditions or that do not require a code to be entered to claim the discount.



We will be updating our help page documentation to provide more detailed explanations of these new features and settings, and we will post an update here when those revised help pages are ready.



If you experience any problems, weird behavior, glitches, etc. with Seller Admin, please report it to us immediately:

https://www.e-junkie.com/ej/contact.php

[melebbles]

Thank you. :)



-Mel

[tcr]

Why did you change the way we generate Item-specific Discounts?



It was great just the way it was! At least it worked :o(



Since yesterday I've been trying to create a single item discount and get the "buy now" button code with the Discount Code field where people can enter a special code and get a discount on my product. And it just isn't working!



Before you made these changes, it was super easy and took less than a minute to create a discount code.



I've contacted support, but have gotten no response!



I'm sure I set up the code correctly, however, when I generate the button code for the product, there is no "Discount Code" field so there's no way to enter the discount code to get the discount.



I have an affiliate who's mailing out to his list of 6000 people tomorrow morning and I have no way to set up the discount for him.



THIS WILL COST ME A BIG PILE OF CASH!



Please put the Item-specific Discounts back the way they were!



~TCR



PS: You should have at least made sure this "new feature" was working properly and that you had instructions for how to use it before replacing what was already working.

[charts]

While I was pleased to see that you're making changes to the discount/coupon feature, I'm a bit disappointed in the interface.



What, in my opinion, E-Junkie needed to improve upon with the discounts was being able to easily limit discounts to a particular category of products. While you can add discounts to individual products, this is quite time consuming when you're dealing with hundreds of products (like I am).



What's the possibility of being able to have "group discounts" and allow you to multiselect products to apply a common discount code/percentage?

[E-junkie_Guru]

Sorry about the Buy Now button-code modifier checkbox; we have fixed that glitch now. We do make every effort to test everything thoroughly before we roll out any upgrade bugfix, but inevitably there are fringe cases we don't notice until someone brings them up. "Better" is the enemy of "Done", so eventually after testing everything we can think of, if we're to make any progress at all we have to roll out what we've got, as refined as we could make it, and then iron out any undiscovered wrinkles as they get reported.



We changed the location of Item-specific discounts to consolidate all discount settings in one common screen together, as the previous setup of having different discounts scattered in different places was just too confusing for too many sellers, and the previous placement of Item Discounts also led to other confusion and mishaps (e.g., sellers mistaking the Item Expiration setting for a discount expiration, mistaking the download attempts/hours settings for discount code uses/hours, etc.).



This also gave us an elegant solution to expand the functionality of Item-specific Discounts, so it's now possible to define those with a maximum use count and/or with minimum quantity/total thresholds, meeting the (very!) popular demand for product-based volume discounts. These new conditional settings for Item Discounts still will not work with Buy Now buttons (yet), but the previous functionality supporting a basic, unconditional flat discount off the unit-price will continue to work just as it always has for Buy Now buttons.





Unfortunately, we'd had no requests for discounts according to product category, and indeed we have no built-in way to categorize products (yet), so that would have to wait for a future release.

[orders]

One question: how do I re-order the list of shipping options that the user sees? Currently, it's showing the most expensive method first (such as Express.) Obviously this is not what I (or they) want. Great features btw.

[orders]

Found a bug.



I'm on a mac. I click the dropdown arrow for the list of existing shipping rules. Then I use the keyboard arrow keys to scroll through the list. When I find the one I want and press Enter, it submits the form below and either a) creates a new rule based on the settings that may have been changed in the form or b) gives a really strangely worded error when the rule you tried to submit already exists. The original intention of my actions: simply to select an existing rule.

[orders]

^--- Firefox 3.5.2

[orders]

Whoa.. ok something is really wrong.



After entering a rule caled "FREE" based on $0 per ounce to the United States. All regular rules that don't even have the optional description field available are being named FREE. It's like even though the description field disappears, it's still being submitted with every new rule. So all my shipping options look like:



FREE - $26.95

FREE - $14.83

FREE - $4.60

[orders]

Ok, yeah, I had to switch back to Price Per Unit Weight, clear out the fields that appeared, then switch back and start creating the rules from scratch again. (Seems to be the only way to change the display order too, btw, to delete them all and start over I mean.)

[orders]

Also, UPS Ground shows up without a label in the customer's shipping selection dropdown. Currently this is what my dropdown says:



Free (0.00)

USPS First Class (1.90)

USPS Priority (4.95)

USPS Express (19.80)

(7.31)



That last line of "(7.31)" should say something like "UPS Ground (7.31)" instead.

[orders]

Found another problem.



I entered a handling charge of 10% and it's treating it like a flat fee. Are you guys sure this is ready for primetime?

[orders]

By "treating it like a flat fee" I meant instead of adding 10% to the shipping it is adding $10 to the shipping.

[orders]

Ok I used a bug to get around a bug (the UPS Ground bug.)



1) I switched to "Price Per Unit Weight"

2) Entered "UPS GROUND" for the description

3) Switched back to UPS Ground

4) Submitted the rule



Now it shows up properly as



UPS GROUND (7.31)



..in the customer's shipping options.

[E-junkie_Chef]

I am sorry, we are looking into the issues pointed out by you. The percentage and shipping description in dropdown issues were known and fixed before we rolled this out to the live site so this is like deja vu :(



I'll keep this thread updated.

[orders]

Woops. Sounds like the wrong artifacts got deployed or not everything made it to all the nodes in the cluster. =)

[E-junkie_Chef]

ctI entered a handling charge of 10% and it's treating it like a flat fee. Are you guys sure this is ready for primetime?

Fixed

ctAlso, UPS Ground shows up without a label in the customer's shipping selection dropdown.

Fixed

ctAfter entering a rule caled "FREE" based on $0 per ounce to the United States. All regular rules that don't even have the optional description field available are being named FREE. It's like even though the description field disappears, it's still being submitted with every new rule.

This was a UI issue. Fixed.

ctI'm on a mac. I click the dropdown arrow for the list of existing shipping rules. Then I use the keyboard arrow keys to scroll through the list. When I find the one I want and press Enter, it submits the form below and either a) creates a new rule based on the settings that may have been changed in the form or b) gives a really strangely worded error when the rule you tried to submit already exists. The original intention of my actions: simply to select an existing rule.

The typo making the error look strangely worded has been fixed. We will change the UI as enter key should doing anything on that screen.



As for the existing rules, they can not be loaded or updated. They can only be deleted.

ctOne question: how do I re-order the list of shipping options that the user sees? Currently, it's showing the most expensive method first (such as Express.) Obviously this is not what I (or they) want. Great features btw.

We'll add an "order" field with each rule so after matching the conditions, multiple methods are shown based on the order specified and not simply the order they were added in.

[scs]

I have to concur with ct on the issues being seen...this 'new and improved' interface has made my life a living hell trying to get existing codes updated and/or create new ones...why are have my boxes greyed out? Good Grief.

[E-junkie_Chef]

SCSI have to concur with ct on the issues being seen...this 'new and improved' interface has made my life a living hell trying to get existing codes updated and/or create new ones...why are have my boxes greyed out? Good Grief.

Can you please elaborate the issue. Messages from ct were about shipping, not discounts.

[orders]

I have an item (a sticker) that weighs 0.1oz and ships in an envelope that weighs 0.2oz, for a grand total of 0.3oz. However, the USPS First Class rate I'm getting is $1.22!! USPS.com lists the price at $0.44. The rule being used is USPS Cheapest Available.