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Sharon
VP-CART Super User

357 Posts
Posted - January 22 2019 :  06:46:09  Show Profile  Visit Sharon's Homepage  Reply with Quote
Any news on a release date yet? From what I''ve seen it looks good & we are in need of a refresh.

Alex123
VP-CART Super User

USA
223 Posts
Posted - January 22 2019 :  13:26:34  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
Seems some live websites are already running on VPcart 9. Probably you could contact them and see whether your can be upgraded to v9 even though it is not released.

Alex
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InkMagic
VP-CART New User

123 Posts
Posted - January 22 2019 :  18:35:50  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
Hi Sharon:
I updated one of my sites to V9 Beta in early November, just to experiment with it. Overall it seems quite stable and they have done many, many tweaks over the past few months.

I have played around with the ''Mega Menu''. Seems a little sluggish loading but I do l like it. It also will not resize fonts or width so it may not show if the browser isn''t wide enough.
www.rainbowink.ca

I have a number of websites and they are either dark blue or dark green themes. In earlier versions I had to manually search and replace ''dark blue'' with ''dark green'' in the CSS files. With the V9 in the Layout Manager there is a website color picker. You can Dark Green or Dark Blue or some other color from a palette and bingo ... the color theme of your website is done. Huge time saver if you''ve got several websites using different colors.

Like yourself, I wanted to do a major facelift for my websites. In general, modernize my websites. I might be completely amiss, but from what I can see, on the front end (which is what the customer sees) I''ve found very few, if any, improvements. I''ve gone through the manuals but nothing much, other than the mega menu, jumps out at me as major formatting/visual updates. I would love to see VPASP put out a detailed manual of just the front end improvements and how to implement them from an earlier upgrade.

I''ve asked for the choice to include Quantity Selection and Buy buttons any time a product is shown, whether it be a featured item on the front page, on a category page, Quick view page or wherever. If a product is shown, I want my customer to be able to buy it right there. Support has indicated that the next beta version will have this option to show a buy button on any ''grid view'' product. Whoo hoo ... I''ve wanted that for a long, long time!

So, it you are looking to do a major facelift on the front end to your category/product displays, then I would suggest you setup an experimental website and play with the Beta V9 Version. My initial insight is that this is not the area they''ve focused on in the upgrade. I get the feeling that 99% of this ''major'' upgrade is in the control panel which ...

My main complaint is the control panel. Once a website is setup, the retailer lives in the control panel to process orders and enter new products. Their main focus is to make the control panel ''responsive'' so it works on a cell phone. (who enters new products on a cell phone, I most certainly never will?) The result is HUGE TEXT and double or triple spacing between lines and lots of HUGE icons and buttons.

I find Product Entry in V9 to be very, very difficult to use ... to the point where I always fall back to my v8 control panel. The print and spacing is so big you can see only 1/3rd the information that you could with v8. V8 control panel took 6 clicks on my scroll wheel to go from top to bottom of the product entry page. V9 takes 17!!!

Yes, the v9 control panel probably looks ''Pretty'' on a cellphone but I find it much less functional to use. Click, Click, Click ... Scroll, Scroll, Scroll ... and it needs to be at lease 80% of the desktop screen to be usable. Unless there are major usability changes to the control panel and in particular the product entry, it''s a deal breaker for me.

All I can say is try the beta version before investing in the upgrade.
Edited by - InkMagic on January 22 2019 18:41:53
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Sharon
VP-CART Super User

357 Posts
Posted - January 23 2019 :  03:12:34  Show Profile  Visit Sharon's Homepage  Reply with Quote
quote:
Originally posted by InkMagic
SNIP
All I can say is try the beta version before investing in the upgrade.


Hi InkMagic & thanks for your informative reply. I note your comments & reservations about the new control panel. As I am the person who enters & amends all products on our sites I don''t think I will be rushing to upgrade.
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support
Administrator

4679 Posts
Posted - January 23 2019 :  03:29:37  Show Profile  Visit support's Homepage  Reply with Quote
Hi Dale,

Thanks for your thoughts and sorry to hear that you still are not happy with the admin.

Getting feedback from our beta testers has been awesome for us to help smooth out any issues or things that don''t quite qwork the way we envisaged.

We have actually changed it a lot further based on your earlier thoughts but have not posted live in the beta release as yet as we are still making some tweaks.

Not sure if you know this but we have an option in the admin to disable responsive viewing as well so it is a normal admin interface even on mobile devices.

You just need to open the slider from the right of the admin screen and Disable Responsive.

We do actually have some great features in VPCart 9, many of them, such as the new Design Manager, will allow you to completely change and refresh the look of your store without touching any code at all.

Others are hidden under the covers where you wont see them such as the new method of rendering the formatting of the front end layout using JavaScript instead of ASP.

This has sped up the display dramatically across devices.

That being said the new beta should be ready by the coming Monday and we are also happy to set anyone up with a free trial of VPCart 9 as well on our servers for you to play with and get a feel of how it has been changed.

Thanks!

Cam Flanigan
VPCart Customer Service
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petermc
Starting Member

Ireland
17 Posts
Posted - January 23 2019 :  08:20:03  Show Profile  Visit petermc's Homepage  Reply with Quote
I''ll give a different perspective.
Our site is www.candlewarehouse.ie We launched v9 in October.

Yes the product entry is different and takes getting used to, but it is much quicker and has the all important GTIN field required for google shopping.

It requires a little fiddling to work out all the display options, but again, once you know, it takes no time to add or make changes. We are adding a ticket to change the layout to full screen (can''t seem to see how that''s done). I have zero programming knowledge and able to do all the design changes myself - I have a third party contractor who does the programming end for me. ( Damian at cubicvision http://www.cubicvision.com/ )

We have had some issues with java conflicts and have had some custom programming done, but to us its a HUGE jump up in userbility from both admin and customer experience.

In terms of customer response, we''ve had average sales value jump almost 20% and our January sales look set to be near 50% higher 2018 figures and has meant additional staff being employed.

Still a few tweaks needed here and there, but anything we wanted we got done by the team quickly. (extra cost where custom work was asked for) . Overall very happy with the new version and we''ve yet to utilise many features.

www.candlewarehouse.ie
Edited by - petermc on January 23 2019 08:23:33
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InkMagic
VP-CART New User

123 Posts
Posted - January 23 2019 :  13:16:17  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
Hi Cam:

Yes, your programmers have implemented quite a number of changes to the control panel, several of which I suggested, in the past couple months. Your support staff are definitely second to none!!

I''ve been checking for an updated beta download almost on a daily basis as support has indicated several of my areas of concern have been addressed and will be included in the next update. Glad to hear it will be out in the next week or so!

I totally agree being able to change website theme colors, fonts, font size and more globally or by page section is a real major improvement. I have definitely got to spend more time playing with it to see its'' full potential.

Petermc:

Thank you so much for taking the time to respond with your experience. It''s good to hear your enthusiasm as I''ve been a little discouraged with the upgrade. I''ve got a bunch of new products to enter so I''ll give the V9 product entry another try with the hope that I can adjust to it as you have. Maybe I just didn''t give it a fair chance.

I''ve spent little time on the actual front end, the part which the customer sees. Your website looks just wonderful!! It''s very modern ... exactly what I was hoping I could do with my websites.

Viewing your website has sent me on a new quest to take the time to dive deeper into the display possibilities built into V9.

Thank you!
Dale
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petermc
Starting Member

Ireland
17 Posts
Posted - January 24 2019 :  03:19:34  Show Profile  Visit petermc's Homepage  Reply with Quote
inkmagic - very easy for the display boxes. Go to layout manager, "add box", "body free text", the select what priority it should be on the page - (my categories are sequence 2), then in the display text box on the right side select the "image" icon, upload the image, add the link and size it to what you want. For 5 across I have each image at 200x100 with 10 point spacing.

The new menu manager (I had my own hashed version in the old v8) is the biggest selling point as about half our orders come from mobile (and increasing) and this makes mobile surfing and purchasing very easy.

On the mobile back end funcuality - I wouldn''t use it for adding new products, but would use it regularly to update items, esp stock levels and pricing and checking order levels.

www.candlewarehouse.ie
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InkMagic
VP-CART New User

123 Posts
Posted - January 24 2019 :  18:22:54  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
Hi Petermc:

Having the category graphics section right below the header was one of first things that caught my eye when I first viewed your website. Yesterday I put a category section on mine using the ''body Category'' rather than the ''Free Text''. The upper level categories were automatically pulled in. Had to resize all the pics to 150 X 150 to align the boxes properly. With your method you can insert anything you want such as your Winter Sale, so it is more flexible.

About 30% of my sales are done on mobile devices which is up quite dramatically from a couple years ago.

All of your ''Latest Items'' are so uniformly spaced. Have you found a setting which forces a max height for the product pics or did you resize before uploading? I resize most of my pics t0 200 wide so the columns are the same width but toner cartridges are wide and not very tall so it''s the pic height that makes the items on my front page look untidy and not uniform.

www.rainbowink.ca

I certainly appreciate your details on how you made up your category boxes. I''m sure it will help many others.

Thanks!
Dale
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petermc
Starting Member

Ireland
17 Posts
Posted - March 31 2019 :  14:33:37  Show Profile  Visit petermc's Homepage  Reply with Quote
quote:
Originally posted by InkMagic

Hi Petermc:



All of your ''Latest Items'' are so uniformly spaced. Have you found a setting which forces a max height for the product pics or did you resize before uploading? I resize most of my pics t0 200 wide so the columns are the same width but toner cartridges are wide and not very tall so it''s the pic height that makes the items on my front page look untidy and not uniform.




This is one of the areas I like in v9. When I''m uploading images I just upload to the "zoom"image. Then it gives options to use that as both default image and thumbnail image.

Leave the width size blank so that the width will fit the height of the image as many of my images are higher than wide.

In a couple of clicks this gives you zoom, default and thumbnail image all perfectly sized to what suits you best.

If I can be critical on your site, (I love getting criticism of my site) your graphics are not great. Find someone on fivvr or a local college student to give a uniform look on all your sliders and also bring that style into category images. A student might be best as they can use your site as an example for their studies. - We had a student use our site as a google ads example for pushing into new countries and it was hugely successful.

www.candlewarehouse.ie
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InkMagic
VP-CART New User

123 Posts
Posted - April 02 2019 :  15:02:31  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
Hi Petermc:

Thank yo for taking the time to respond to my inquiry about the sizing of your graphics.

To make my product pics more uniform in size, I used a script in Photoshop which resized all 2,400 product pics to 200 pixels in width. It did the job but some of my smaller item pictures are now pixelated and some are cut off at the top. Not overly pleased with the outcome. Overall my product pictures were better before I resized them, so maybe I''ll upload the originals.

I didn''t know that uploading a ''zoomed'' image also gives you the option to have it create the other default sizes. I''ll need to look into that.

You are right about the graphics in the sliders not being up to today''s standards. I appreciate you suggesting fivvr. Never heard of them but will take a closer look .... there again, maybe I should get my son-in-law in to have a look, he''s a graphic designer.

You comments and suggestions are certainly appreciated!!
Dale
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