Shipping, Taxation, multivendor CCK, native EasySocial App and more with Quick2cart 2.2

When we started planning Quick2Cart 2.2, we admittedly bit of more than what we could chew so to say from a timeline perspective. This release has lots and lots of features and not many of them small. This led to lot of delays on our end. We are extremely sorry about this but we cannot release something we believe is not complete and hence the delay. However, I hope you will all agree that it was all worth the wait !

Quick2cart v2.2 takes Joomla Ecommerce to new highs with major improvements in User experience and some really awesome features. Multi Vendor Shipping and taxation, CCK Multivendor support, tight EasySocial Integration are just the tip of the feature iceberg we have in this release ! Read on for the full Scoop !!

Shipping and Taxation Reloaded

Shipping and taxation was a major point of this release. It was important that it be done in a way that can be flexible and scalable to a variety of situations. The basis of shipping and taxation is based on Geographical Zones.

Zones

Zones are used to club together regions and/or countries that have something in common from a shipping or taxation perspective. For instance you could make a zone called the ‘Indian Subcontinent’ with all the countries included since your shipping provider charges you the same fees for all those countries. Further Zones are used extensively when you define Shipping and Tax rates. Each store needs to have its own zones for full flexibility.

Tax Rates and Profiles

By setting up zones you can set tax rates and in some cases multiple taxes are applied to a single product for eg: VAT (Value added tax), LBT (Local Body Tax), Service Tax etc. In Tax Profiles, you are able to relate the tax rate to the billing or shipping address. For instance to send products to Pune, you will attract both LBT and VAT. LBT being a function of the shipping address and VAT of the billing address.

Improved Shipping and extensible infrastructure

We present a full fledge shipping configuration system in Quick2Cart 2.2 with which you can create highly configurable shipping rules. Though we are not releasing any 3rd Party shipping provider plugins like FedX in this release, the infrastructure needed to build these is now in place and we welcome 3rd Party developers to come and help us build these !

The inbuilt Shipping configuration system lets you define methods based on Weight, Quantity as well as flat rate. You can setup methods like Same day Shipping, 15 day shipping etc. You can set up rates based on the Zones available. Overall its extremely flexible.

CCK Support for Multi Vendor in Frontend and Backend

Quick2Cart has been a popular choice for multivendor Joomla setups however till now we did not offer the ability to create Multi Vendor with Content construction kits. Quick2Cart 2.2 brings this much awaited feature. We have tested this with native Joomla, Zoo, K2 and Flexicontent. However the architecture is such that 3PD implementations like Sebold and JReviews should also work fine. Note that in CCK multi vendor implementations, you need to use native CCK based frontend submissions instead of the native Product form.

The frontend my products view as well as the backend products view now shows products from native as well as CCKs with the detail and edit links redirected to the respective views in the CCK or native system.

Ajaxed Checkout Process

Quick2Cart is the 3rd product now to benefit from the UI/UX improvements we made with our jTicketing release earlier this year. The checkout process is completely Ajaxed and has a nice User interface.

Single store checkout

In some cases you might want to use Quick2Cart in such a way that you can only buy from one store at a time. You can now do this with the Force single store checkout option in Quick2Cart. The admin can set this globally in the backend configuration.

Country manager with Multi Lingual Support

We have introduced a Country manager in the backend to let the admin choose which all countries they want to offer in the Billing & Shipping forms. The manager supports adding a language constant if you want to translate the country select lists. 

Keep your website SEO on track with Meta Data management, Microdata and OG tags support

This version is adds a lots of SEO improvements letting you manage product meta data for native products. Microdata and OG Tags support lets you add more context to your products. If you use CCKs for managing products there are several CCK plugins that let you do this already for them.

Quick2cart is even more Social now !

Awesome native app for EasySocial

You gave us this feedback for Invitex that our EasySocial apps should be more native. We have started in that direction with Quick2Cart with a nice ajax cart app for EasySocial profiles. We are looking for lots of feedback here ! The app shows the users products on his profile page in the Native EasySocial way. A profile app already exists for JomSocial.

Points integration for EasySocial and JomSocial + payment gateways

Now incentivise selling and shopping on your site with our points integration.. What's more let them reuse the points using the points payment gateways for EasySocial/JomSocial.

Pin Layouts, Fully Responsive backend and frontend

Seamless shopping experience to the user with improved pin layouts. Plus viewing the it in any screen size whether it’s a smartphone or a table be it anything, Quick2cart will adjust itself according to the screen size as both frontend and backend are responsive now.

Improved Dashboards for Admin and Store owners

The site admin can get a birds eye view of the site with backend dashboard as it covers all time sales, total products sold, total orders and a detailed analysis provided with a supporting bar graph and pie chart. The Store owner will also be able to see their own dashboard which has an improved user interface and better analytics.

Backend store creation and list view

Creation of stores at backend has been introduced in this version. Admin can create and edit stores plus will have a listview to see all the available store on the website at a glance.

Admin approval and email notification settings tab.

Admin has the control! Admin approval is needed to publish a new store and a new product.
Email notification can be sent if a store is edited or a product is edited and even on a store creation.
All this can be turned on and off from this tab.

This is not all plenty more is there. Subscribe and experience it yourself.

You can have a quick look at our demos to experience the product.

Joomla Demo Jomsocial Demo Easysocial Demo Buy Now

For the full list of changes & bugs fixed, please see the detailed changelog accompanying the release. As always looking forward to hearing more from you and your feedback. Do comment away !

"Joomla + Quick2Cart = Ecommerce Awesomeness" Webinar on 16th on Sep 2014, 7pm IST 

Note: In Quick2Cart 2.2 We have introduced country and region manager.This change affects JTicketing and JGive , also It improves country and region manager for JTicketing. So, if you have already installed jGive, jTicketing on your site and are about to install Quick2Cart 2.2 then - In that case you need to upgrade both jGive and jTicketing