Perch Shop 1.2

The new release of Perch Shop brings a number of new features and updates, heavily influenced by the voting on the Shop Roadmap. This is proving an invaluable indicator of the requirements of some of the key customers deploying Shop projects within their agencies, enabling us to focus work on the areas it’s needed most.

The top request on the roadmap has always been recurring or subscription billing. That’s not something we’ve attempted to tackle in Shop 1.2, as it’s a fairly large project. Instead, we’ve focused on those features which improve the scope of functionality that we already have. Expect a post on the issue of recurring billing soon!

Product import

Second in votes on the list of features was product import. We’ve tackled this and Shop 1.2 has an API for importing products, brands, currencies and countries, alongside the ability that Runway 3.0.3 brings of being able to import assets. I’ve written about importing products in a separate post.

Importing is a Perch Runway-only feature, not supported by Shop running on Perch.

Sales periods

Another Runway feature for Shop is the ability to schedule periods in which your shop goes into ‘sale’ mode. When a sale is active, any products with a different sale price will be displayed at that reduced price.

Sales activate and deactivate at specified dates and times, so you can have a sale that starts at midnight without tasking an employee to sit up and flip a switch! It all happens automatically.

Promotions

Shop 1.0 had promotions that applied across the entire cart. In Shop 1.2 for Runway there are a couple of new ways to use promotions.

The first is a restriction by category. When a promotion is configured with one or more categories, only products within those categories will have the promotion applied. This enables you to run offers like “50% off Easter eggs” without giving a discount on summer picnic sets.

The next change in promotions is a new type of promotion - use sale price. When this promotion type is applied, the products are reduced to their sale price. This gives you the ability to set product-specific discounts rather than a set percentage or value discount across the whole cart.

Headless cart

Runway 3.0 introduced headless requests, including the ability in Shop 1.1 to make headless product requests. Shop 1.2 adds to this with the ability to make headless requests for the cart. This is particularly useful if you want to create a small dynamic on-page mini cart as your customer browses around, and load it asynchronously for the best performance.

Country manager

Ever fancied having your own country? Now you can! Shop 1.2 adds the ability to manage the list of countries, including the ability to deactivate countries you don’t wish to sell to.

Lots of other small improvements

We’ve also made improvements to things like discount codes being available in emails, editing permissions being added for emails, disabling special customer pricing when they log out, and we’ve fixed a few bugs too.

We hope that this will prove a useful update to Shop and open up a few more possibilities for using it in more projects!