Thread: AspDotNetStorefront ML v8.0 Released

We are proud to announce the latest release of its flagship AspDotNetStorefront ML e-commerce shopping cart platform. In the latest ML v8.0 release significant enhancements have been introduced in the platform to increase conversion rates, maximize performance, and reduce administrative overhead to put merchants in the best possible position to maximize profits and grow their online e-commerce sales in a slowing global economy.

AspDotNetStorefront ML 8.0 includes powerful, high performance, full-text product searching, helping shoppers find what they are looking for faster and keeping them anchored to your site. Additionally, AspDotNetStorefront will intelligently build related products as shoppers browse your site and display them on your product pages, allowing merchants to effortlessly increase upsell percentages and capitalize on cross-marketing opportunities. New inventory control features add flexibility to how out of stock products are handled on your site to reduce shopper frustration, and a reorganized and redesigned admin site makes performing common tasks more intuitive. Tabbed product pages make it efficient and attractive to organize complex product data, and “customers who bought x also bought y” capabilities are now included out of the box.

“We’ve gone to great lengths to focus our development efforts on providing tools that allow merchants to make the most out of every sale opportunity,” AspDotNetStorefront COO & Executive Vice President Dan Van Kuren remarked. “With more consumers indicating they’ll be shopping online this busy holiday season even in uncertain economic times, merchants need to take advantage of technologies that set them above their competition. Version 8.0 puts advanced capabilities within reach of ecommerce veterans and fledgling online businesses alike while maintaining exceptional ease of use and minimizing administrative overhead. Take our renowned SEO capabilities and add to that our constantly expanding feature set, and you have an ecommerce platform that can take you across the finish line in first place. This latest release demonstrates our commitment to helping our online merchants grow, regardless of what is happening in the market.”

AspDotNetStorefront ML Version 8.0 contains many new exciting e-commerce features, including the following:

• Exciting new merchant control panel, featuring a new layout, and expanded use of Wizards to assist merchants in configuring their store features, settings, and capabilities
• Tabbed product page presents all product details without the need for scrolling the browser screen
• Dramatically Improved (Full Text) Search Performance, to identify root words, plurals, compound phrases, and search term reordering
• Automatic display of Product Suggestions, based on previous customer purchases, This provides an Amazon.com like capability guiding customers to additional products of interest for purchase
• Improved display of Product Stock Conditions, allowing merchants greater flexibility in indicating real-time inventory status
• Support for credit card processing by Sage Payment Systems
• Improved "Page Not Found" (404 handling) display, offering e-commerce driven search suggestions based on missing page attributes guiding consumers to the best fit pages and products.
• Automatic display of a customers' viewing history, allowing them to quickly locate and view recently viewed products
• Automatic display of Related Products, based on heuristics of product-view data
• Improved handling of "Delayed Capture" payment methods, to allow merchants to void non-completed orders
• Improved compliance with XHTML display standards, including the ability to specify the exact “alt” text of a product image, for improved website accessibility for people with special needs and SEO indexing
• 400% faster page loads than v7.0 version

Asp.net 3.5 (C# 3.0, VB.NET) and SQL 2005 also now required and supported.

Additionally, AspDotNetStorefront will be updating its online demo sites to better showcase our new technologies. Prospective customers will enjoy a greatly expanded product database to demonstrate the nearly unlimited capabilities of the AspDotNetStorefront shopping cart platform; developers and web designers can modify skin templates to see for themselves how easily professional e-commerce sites can be developed using the AspDotNetStorefront platform.

One question... is there an upgrade path from v7.1.1.0 to v8.0 ?

Absolutely Follow the same instructions as with any other upgrade. Instructions can be found here.

Perfect timing! I just installed 7.1.1.0 today. I'm glad I didn't get very far into configuring anything.

I know you guys stated before that with new versioning requirements, you would be putting out the VB versions the same day as the C# version. Being this is such a big jump version wise, is there a small delay with the VB version?

is there a front end demo site?

It's exactly what I've grown accustomed to with ASPDNSF - fantastic.

Upgraded from 7.025 to 8.0 and it was simple. Very easy, very fast. After all backups were done, it took about 20 minutes and that's because uploading the new files took 19 minutes for me. Super fast, super easy upgrade.

Complete new look on the backend.

I will have to play

I'll post some teaser shots of the new admin site in a different thread Give me a few minutes...

Any idea when the manual will be update?

The manual has already been updated The update is available at http://manual.aspdotnetstorefront.com/MLv80

- Dan

How do I get the dynamic search working? One of the biggest things we sell on our site is HDMI cables, if I search for "hdmi cable" in 8.0 I get just a handful of results, when I search for "cable hdmi" I get no results... Is there something I'm not doing right?

I found the answer, http://manual.aspdotnetstorefront.co...extsearch.ashx


Thanks guys,
You almost make it too easy.

Is there a down side to modifying the search architecture to use the SQL LIKE condition against product description rather than setting up full text search?

Let's say we get thousands of visitors a day. Is one way going to out-perform the other?

With full text-search I don't even think it should be an option with SQL Express when you have a descent amount of products (1000+) with long descriptions. Am I thinking correctly?

K-BL

I went through my upgrade panel and see the C# version I can upgrade, but was looking for the VB upgrade. Can you tell me when it will be available please? Thank you

The 8.0 VB.NET version is already available for download. It is only accessible with a signed SLA, after purchasing source code however.

I am using ML 8.0 and notice that there have been several updates in the past few months. Where do i find out about updates and what improvements they contain?
Is there a page about how to install the incremental updates?
thank you!

That one is listed in the Release Notes included in every build.

How do I upgrade to a newer version of the software? We have a KB article on how to this.

So: login to apsdotnetStorefront.com with the license login
Click Customer Service --> downloads
Look at the available program versions under your license.
Download the update you are interested in.
Extract the files to your drive
In the folder is the readme.txt file that contains the Changelog for this version.
Now read the changelog and decide if you want to install the update.

Hi,

Is there a list available for the stored procedures that were updated in V.8 ? I'll be upgrading from V7.

Is it possible for you to provide this list?

Thanks!
BoyB from PH

We do not have specific documentation that list all the changes made and what were those stored procs, sorry. But the DB upgrade scripts are provided so you open it up and try to determine yourself the changes.

I was just having a browse through the documentation and I came across the ERP Provider Sync Specification at http://manual.aspdotnetstorefront.co...r%20SyncV3.pdf. I note on the front it says "For AspDotNetStorefront ML v8.1 or higher (Portions released in BETA on v8.0)", can you tell me what portions have been released in 8.0 and if 8.1 with the whole thing is available yet. I am particularly interested in the AspDotNetStorefront Add-In Model.

Thanks,

Richard

The current version of AspDotNetStorefront is 8.0.1.2, so there aren't any pieces of that particular spec (with the exception of WSI and event handlers) that are in any current version. The Add-In model in particular was demonstrated recently at our developers conference held in Las Vegas, and will be part of the core architecture in Ashland, our upcoming release.

Thanks for the information George. Do you know when the new release is due?

We tend to frown upon giving out release dates...we feel it puts the emphasis on the wrong things (we'd rather focus on making sure everything is as correct and as efficient as possible then trying to meet a date we came up with months ago), but it shouldn't be too long now

George, it would be WONDERFUL if more software companies operated on a "when its done" as opposed to "it needs to be done by x" methodology!!

Can't we at least get access to a beta so that we can start planning for some of the differences? Many of us are putting projects completely on hold because we don't know how the changes are going to affect our applications.

Which is exactly why we don't announce these things In this industry you can't put things on hold waiting for the next best thing, or you fall even further out of the game due to it's fast paced nature. We do have a planned beta for next week. Will likely be a paid beta with a few exciting incentives wrapped into it. We'll start a new thread with the details when it's available.