Open Shop is a full featured shopping cart released totally for free. The shopping cart software handles both tangible and immaterial products, like services and downloadable software, and has many payment and shipping methods built-in while other "free" systems sell separately the payment methods. In version 3.0 Open Shop became even more powerful and the front-end section has an improved layout and functionality. Let's see what's new in version 3.0 in details.
The new coupons system is inspired from the IOS Reservations products family. You can create discount coupons which are valid within a specified time period and can be used multiple times. The discount can be a fixed amount, like 50 EUR, or a percentage amount, like 20%. More over you have the option to enable the coupon only for specific products! The fact that the same coupon can be used multiple times (configurable) leads to the ability to create marketing campaigns in social media and elsewhere. An example: With code TVSUMMER2021 you get a 10% discount for our TVs during the summer of 2021. Note that if you upgrade from Open Shop v2.x to v3.x any existing old discount coupons will be deleted during the update as the new system is not compatible with the old discount coupons. Also as a configuration parameter regarding the activation of coupons was removed please re-check the discount coupon settings after the update. If you don't want the automatic generation of a discount coupon after a purchase set the Cart percentage option to 0.
The layout of the front-end section has been improved a-lot. The categories pages have new ordering links and option to change the number of products shown. The products themselves have a different styling and improved functionality. The default ios template has been re-designed. New buttons, new forms (Elxis 5.x style), new products comparison and wish-list pages, new cart, and new checkout, are only a few of the pages affected.
Version 3.x has a new payment method built in: Cash on delivery. Also the payment methods now support Payment costs meaning that you can charge the customer an additional fee for picking a specific payment method. Cash on delivery has also an other cool option: It can be bind to specific shipping method(s). This way you can force the customer to select a specific shipping method(s) if he selected the Cash on Delivery payment method. Note that payment costs are also visible to checkout and invoices (html/print/PDF).
In version 2.x there was a special page to select the shipping method before the checkout. In version 3.x this page was removed and the selection of the shipping method is performed in the checkout page. This made the checkout process faster and easier. Also the shipping costs and the payment costs now get calculated by using AJAX in the checkout page and the cart summary gets updated in real time.
You can now add/edit terms and conditions directly from Open Shop administration section. You can also add terms and conditions in multiple languages. Note that this feature requires Elxis 5.2 or newer.
In administration control panel Open Shop 3.x highlights you some buttons for further actions or alerts. For instance if you have new, unseen, orders it highlights you the Orders button and also displays you the number of new orders. The new orders get also highlighted in orders listing page. In products edit page there is a new AJAX uploader for product images which makes uploading images must faster and easier. In front-end section you can search products by colour (if you use colour option in your products). All Open Shop related extensions were updated. These were only a few of the changes and new features introduced in Open Shop 3.0. Download Open Shop and start building an online shop. You will find us in Elxis forum in case you have questions on need assistance.