Release Notes March 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. NextChapter PIM
3. Platform maintenance and health

Marketing & Frontend features

1. Ranking products by property priorities.

There are several ways to rank products on a results page in the navigation (such as category pages). For example, based on product name (a-z), price (low-high or high-low), popularity (number of clicks), manually, and so on.

In addition, you can now also control the priority based on property values.

Example: all products in your shop have the property "season".

The products have different property values, such as summer 2024, spring 2024, winter 2023, autumn 2023, summer 2023, summer 2022, summer 2021, and so on.

You can prioritize these values. For example, if you want to show the newest season at the top, you give the value "summer 2024" the highest priority. The oldest season gets the lowest priority.

If you want to get rid of old assortment, then give older season(s) a higher priority.

The condition is that all products are provided with this property with a value.

This is a very useful functionality to dynamically influence the order of your products.

This feature is automatically available to you in the CMS.

2. Recaptcha in newsletter signup form
To even more strictly stop fake newsletter submissions by bots, and thus keep your mailing list clean, NextChapter has added a recaptcha to the platform. We deploy this on web shops where we see a lot of bot submissions.

3. Choose delivery addresses in the checkout
It happens regularly that customers want to have their package delivered to another address. Therefore, customers can now select their desired address in the checkout. NextChapter is rolling out this innovation in two parts:

The first part consists of selecting addresses in checkout that are already present in the account, for example through a customer import. This is already available.

The second part consists of customers being able to add, edit and delete addresses themselves in their account. This piece will follow later on the roadmap.

4. Landing page after login
You can now control which page customers who log in via My Account land on. Previously, that was the homepage or My Account. Now that is variable. This allows you, for example, to better highlight certain promotions or privileges for account holders.

5. Labels in shopping cart
Labels are used to enhance your products or promotions, or to distinguish between similar products. The labels were already available on the product page and list pages, but now also in the shopping cart. This makes it even clearer to the customer which product is in the shopping cart and whether it is the right product.

6. Server side tracking
Server side tracking is being used more and more because it is becoming increasingly difficult to measure data (only) with cookies. Server side tracking is a method to measure not through cookies in the browser, but through the server.

Facebook did this before, but we see it being used more and more for Google Analytics as well.

NextChapter supports the technical requirements within your shop for server side tracking.

In addition, SST must be set up in Google Tag Manager. You can do this yourself or in cooperation with your marketing partner.

7. Shipment information in My Account
Customers are used to being able to see the current status of their package anytime and anywhere. Therefore, they can now also see their shipment status + Track & Trace link in My Account. This is in addition to the emails a customer naturally receives with shipment information.

8. Category icons
You can now make the menu structure in your webshop even more beautiful by adding a visual aspect to it, such as an icon or another image.

9. Discount rates up to decimals
In the promotions module you can now also give discount percentages to two decimal places (for example 7.50% instead of 7%).

10. New_customer data in datalayer
To better distinguish between existing and new customers in Google Ads, NextChapter has added an additional parameter to the datalayer. According to Google guidelines, the new_customer parameter indicates whether or not a customer has previously placed an order in the past 540 days. You or your marketing partner can use this info in Google Ads for ad optimization.

11. Even more marketplaces in the ChannelEngine integration
NextChapter is continuously expanding the already great ChannelEngine integration for selling on marketplaces. New available marketplaces are About You, Allegro, CDON, Veepee and 24S in various countries.

12. DHL in Bringly integration
In the integration with carrier hub Bringly, the carrier DHL has been added.

The carrier DHL has also long been available directly through the NextChapter carrier module.

NextChapter PIM

1. Content enrichment through AI
For many companies, managing (large numbers of) article data remains a headache. It takes many man hours and often not all article data is enriched by then. To make this process considerably faster and better, NextChapter introduces an AI functionality based on ChatGPT for the enrichment of article data.

In cooperation with our partner Fozzels, basic article data is used as input and additional texts are generated on the basis of prompts (AI commands). For example, for the article name, article description or meta data.

This generates significant time savings in your team and allows you to quickly scale up the amount of enriched articles.

Read all about it in our blog.

2. API
NextChapter PIM has an extensive API that is continuously extended and improved in detail. A recent expansion, for example, is the ability to apply even finer-grained permissions down to the data field level. This also allows you to properly manage product editing via API integrations.

Another example is the ability to create and update automated data schemas based on data from external systems. This makes data field management in PIM faster and more efficient.

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.

Error-free
Problems and bugs in the platform are always solved by us immediately. That is why 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.