Ten Freewebstore System Improvements To Know About

Over the past few months, we’ve been building a brand-new product system and this week we’ll start the staged rollout.

How will the rollout look: 

1. 20th Apr 2023: Brand new users signing up will have access.
2. 25th Apr 2023: A select few existing users will be migrated.
3. 1st May 2023: Each day moving forward we’ll migrate 100k stores, starting with the newest to the oldest.

The product system is basically what powers your product’s data, how it’s saved, and how it’s served to you within the control panel, your live store, and within product feeds (along with much more). 

But what does this mean and how will this affect you?

Product Options

Product options are no longer a thing. Well, they are, but they’ve been split up into Addons & Variations and are no longer called “Options”.

Addons are options that do NOT affect product stock. Essentially, they are something the customer might add to their purchase. For example, if you offer gift wrapping for a product. 

Variations are options that DO have stock. These are basically different products within a single product. For example, you might sell multiple sizes, colors, and materials for a single T-Shirt style. Each variation has its own SKU, stock, price, image, weight, length, height, depth, low stock level, and Google attributes. 

With these changes, it also means you can now export and import all your variations saving countless hours, YAY!

This is the largest and most noticeable change in the product system, so although it might be a little confusing at the start, we’re sure you’ll grow to love the change. 

Notes

Previously, notes for a product were a single block of text. Whereas now you can add multiple notes to a product. They have their own tab, you can reply to notes, see which staff member wrote them, and set the type e.g. urgent.

Great to keep track of what’s happening or to provide some instructions for your staff.

Abstract

We’ve introduced a product abstract. This allows you to write a short 200-character description of the product. We’ll be introducing these into live themes going forward. These will be used for Google Feeds and other product feeds.

Dimensions

3 new product attributes are available, length, height, and depth. Going forward, these will help you ship the product in the correct parcel for the correct price. It will also allow our Live Rates feature to provide your customers with perfect shipping options. 

Description

We’ve renamed the “Description” feature to “Rich Text Description”.

This description now drastically changes your product score. Descriptions < 1000 characters will be given a negative score.

Product Feeds

Product feeds were generated once every 24-48 hours. This meant there was less strain on our internal systems, however, it also meant some product data could be stale (outdated) in these feeds. 

Going forward, each time you edit a product, your feed will be automatically updated in readiness for the next time the feed is fetched. So now your product data in your feeds for selling on online marketplaces like Google or Amazon shopping or your Facebook Shop will always be up-to-date. 

Product List Page

Previously the product list page was powered by a system called “Cloudsearch”. This was great as it allowed you to filter by lots of attributes of a product. However, it was slow, and if a product was edited/ deleted, this system had a delay of around 1-3 minutes, meaning the data on this page could be stale. 

Going forward, we’ve reduced the complexity of this page. Now you’ll see your products as they are with up-to-date data. It’s super fast and does exactly what this page should do – List your products. 

Don’t worry though, we’ve created an “Advanced Search” page for those who want to filter/ search their products like they used to. 

Imports

We’ve improved the Product Importer feature to allow all new attributes to be imported. As well as this, some old attributes that couldn’t be imported now can be: 

• Variants
• Image Alt Tags
• Abstract
• Low Stock Alert
• Weight Units
• Additional Images
• Published
• Featured
• Locked
• Height
• Height Units
• Width
• Width Units
• Depth
• Depth Units

Speed

We’re always looking for ways to improve the load times of the control panel and your live stores. With the new product system, you should see a drastic improvement in load times across the board.

Smaller Changes

Along with all the above, we should mention the small things too! Why leave the little things out?

• Stock
  • You can now see which staff member updated the stock of a product.
  • Stock management can be enabled directly on the Product > Edit page.
• Bulk Buying
  • Each bulk buying rule can now have its own denominator, like the image shown below

• Image Alt Tags
  • Previously, we’d give your product images an automatic alt tag of the product name. Although this is still true, you can now edit these as you see fit.
• Product Score
  • 2 new scores are now in place: F & G
  • Not having a product description greater than 1000 characters will reduce your score.
  • A short description (abstract) has been included in the score.

Going Forward

Although most of these changes may seem small to you, it’s now an even greater piece of kit that we can update super fast!

Going forward you can expect us to release new features and updates quicker than ever. 

Here are a few product-related features we plan to launch in the near future now that the new product system is in place: 

• Digital Products
• Gift Cards
• Loyalty Points
• Customizable Product Forms.

Freewebstore is the only free forever eCommerce platform that provides all the tools needed to build a free online store and our dedicated support team is on hand every step of the way.