Release Notes January 2024

We are also continuously working on product development. Keep an eye on our blog, LinkedIn page and newsletter so that you don't miss any of our new developments. Want to know more about the release notes or their implementation in your webshop(s) and channels? Feel free to contact us.

We have done a lot of innovations in the past few months in various areas, such as:

1. Marketing & Frontend features
2. Extensions in features
3. NextChapter OMS
4. NextChapter PIM
5. Platform maintenance and health

Marketing & Frontend features

1. More features in Banner module

In the previous release notes you have already read that NextChapter has a new functionality for content bannering on list pages. The positions between products was already available.

New are:
- Full-width banners (called "row position").
- The ability to display all types of banners on both category and brand pages.
- The media is loaded lazily to ensure page speed.

Content banners as retail media
The content banners on list pages can be used to draw attention to promotions or products. But you can also use the banners as Retail Media functionality. Retail Media is the umbrella term for offering extra marketing exposure to your partners, such as brands and suppliers. You can offer banner positions to a brand/supplier for a period of time to communicate a promotion or branding campaign more prominently on your shop.

Examples row position:

Examples product position:

2. The Powerstep

The Powerstep is a powerful tool to increase your customers' order amount. The Powerstep is a pop-up in which you can offer related (cross sell) products. The pop-up appears when your customer places a product in the shopping cart.

The products in the Powerstep currently work in combination with product recommendations driven from Clerk.io. Clerk.io is a tool that allows you to show personalized product recommendations in various places in your web shop, including the Powerstep.

It allows you to easily and effectively increase the order value and sales on your shop.

3. Home page behind login

When customers log in to your webshop, they land on the My Account environment or the homepage by default. You can now also choose to have customers land on a page of their own choosing. For example, a page with special benefits for logged-in customers or with a unique promotion.

Extensions in features

1. Extensions in the blog module
Publication date: You can now easily schedule blogs by giving them a publication date. This allows you to prepare blogs in advance and schedule them to go live on a date in the future.

Test and live: Also added are "test" and "live" checkboxes that allow you to decide to preview your blog on the test environment first and then put it live.

2. Lazyloading Instagram
Many web shops display a rail with their most recent Instagram posts on the homepage. Instagram is a platform that is all about high quality images. In order not to let the high quality (heavy images) affect the pagespeed of your webshop, these images are loaded lazy.

Lazy loading is a well-known technique that ensures that an image is not directly loaded when the page loads, but only when the visitor scrolls to that part of the web shop.

3. Extension schema.org
Rich snippet logic is continuously expanded according to market needs. In the website schema, for example, the site name was already available, but now it can also be managed in NextChapter.

Also, the entire organization schema has been added.

4. Copernica: Language/country information
For new newsletter subscriptions on a multilingual web shop, NextChapter now also sends the country and language information to Copernica. This can be used in Copernica to improve the campaigns.

5. Update GA4 cookie
NextChapter uses cookie variables in the url, which web shops can use to match the thank you page -which often opens in a different browser than where the purchase takes place- with the purchase in Google Analytics. This functionality has been updated.

6. Clarification in validation forms
In the forms functionality in NextChapter, it is possible to validate input fields so that customers post the correct information, such as only numbers allowed in the phone number field. The validation notifications are now improved so that it is clearer to the customer what to adjust if a customer completes a form incompletely/incorrectly or uploads an attachment in the wrong file format.

NextChapter OMS

1. Rejects in NextChapter vendor backend
In NextChapter OMS you can connect multiple stock locations from where (partial) orders from your webshop are shipped, such as stores in the webshop of a franchise model or external vendors in a curated Marketplace model. These stores and vendors can use the NextChapter vendor backoffice from where the locations process and ship their (partial) order.

It may happen that the stock location unexpectedly cannot deliver the (partial) order. In that case they can reject the order and the location can now provide a reason for the rejection of the order. This allows you as a platform operator to better manage the performance of your stock locations.

2. Automatic reallocation after rejection
In case a (partial) order is unexpectedly rejected, this (partial) order will now automatically go back into the order allocation process to be assigned to another stock location. Of course, the rejecting location is not taken into account again. As a result, orders are always sent as soon as possible, you have no manual work as a platform operator and you avoid unnecessary refunds.

NextChapter PIM

1. Multilingualism marketplaces
Some marketplaces are multilingual, such as Inno.be in Dutch and French. In NextChapter PIM you can now better manage your content centrally per Marketplace in multiple languages for one Marketplace.

This is an improvement in PIM in addition to the existing possibilities for managing different content per sales channel and per language, such as different content for multiple web shops or Marketplaces in different languages.

2. Product overview per sales channel
In PIM you can now more easily see an overview of the products you offer per sales channel such as web shops and marketplaces. So you can easily see in PIM how many and which products you offer on a sales channel, which products are valid and which products still need to be enriched. This allows your team to optimize products per sales channel faster and easier.

3. Product export per sales channel
The extensive multichannel functionality in NextChapter PIM allows you to link products to one or more sales channels. In the exports, it has been made easier to export products based on the sales channel.

4. API
NextChapter PIM has an extensive API that is continuously expanded and improved in detail. A recent expansion is the ability to apply even more sophisticated rights regarding GET and POST of the data fields. This also allows you to manage product processing via API integrations.

Example: a Price scraping tool aims to update prices on a web shop. To achieve this, the scraping tool gets rights in the API to retrieve the EAN, purchase price and selling price of items (GET). Conversely, this tool can only update the 'new sale price' field (POST).

Platform maintenance and health

NextChapter focuses non-stop in every release on platform maintenance in the broadest sense of the word. This ensures technical stability and quality, obsolete components are updated or removed, existing code is improved, underlying technology is upgraded to the latest versions and the highest security and privacy requirements are met with great care. All with the goal of a worry-free, stable platform of high quality and strong performance.

Integrations

1. More marketplace integrations
Selling can now be done on even more marketplaces, such as Douglas, OrderChamp, Kaufland, Home24 and Decathlon.

Check out the full list of marketplaces now supported in What's Next. The list is constantly expanding and the possibilities for selling on marketplaces are endless.

2. Omnia
Omnia is a price-scraping tool that compares prices of your products with other providers in the marketplace. Based on those prices and other rules, Omnia can adjust your product prices to stay competitive. NextChapter has a direct integration with Omnia for these new product prices.

3. SRS
Direct integration with SRS POS/ERP for orders, shipments, returns, cancellations and customers.

4. Winstore
A new direct integration with ACA Winstore for products.

Error free

Problems and bugs in the platform are always solved by us immediately. Therefore the NextChapter Platform is completely bug free.

Contact

Do you have questions about the Release Notes or their implementation on your webshop(s) and channels? Please let us know.