CS-Cart and Multi-Vendor 4.4.1 Are Here!

Meet a new release loaded with long-awaited features: email template editor, document editor, safer upgrading, vendor subscription plans, and a bunch of others.

New Stuff

CS-Cart 4.4.1 adds new features to your store and saves backward compatibility. Check the list below to find out about highlights of CS-Cart 4.4.1 and click the links to read detailed posts about each:

• Email template editor. By using the email template editor, admins manage all the email notifications of their stores and modify them right in the admin panel without diving into code editing. In Design → Email templates, you can see all the email notifications a customer and an admin can possibly receive. Click the one you need to edit and change its contents by inserting the necessary variables in plain text mode.
• Document editor. The document editor allows store admins to construct and edit invoices, packing slips, gift certificates, and order summaries in the admin panel. The workflow is similar to email editing: in Design → Documents, choose the document you want to edit and modify it by inserting variables and code snippets.
• Free Ebay Synchronization and Facebook. The eBay Synchronization add-on allows exporting your products to eBay. And the Facebook add-on embeds your store into your Facebook page. Before, we charged $125 for eBay Synchronization and $90 per year for Facebook. Now these add-ons come with CS-Cart for free. Enjoy!
• New logic of themes. A major benefit from this new logic for store owners is that custom themes won’t be broken after the store upgrade. The point is—the upgrade only changes the default Responsive theme files. Plus, CS-Cart 4.4.1 features a new theme called “Bright”. If you’re going to use it, don’t forget to export your current layout and import it back to the Bright theme. This ensures a proper arrangement of the content blocks.
• File changes detector. To make the upgrade process of a CS-Cart store conflict free, admins should keep the CS-Cart core files unchanged. To track core changes, we’re presenting another helpful feature in 4.4.1—a file changes detector. This detector scans the CS-Cart core for changes automatically when you log in to the admin panel. You can also launch it manually in Administration → File changes detector. The detector warns you in advance that you have changes in the CS-Cart core and you can lose them after the next upgrade or face conflicts during the upgrade.
• Vendor subscription plans. Multi-Vendor 4.4.1 features vendor subscription plans. Marketplace owners create plans with certain restrictions for vendors depending on the price of a plan. An admin can set the maximum number of products a vendor can have, the amount of commission, etc.
• Order statuses on a partial refund via PayPal. Before, when a customer made a partial refund via PayPal, his/her order got the same status as for a full refund. By default, the order was simply cancelled. The point is—a partially refunded order shouldn’t be cancelled because a customer didn’t make a full refund. To fix this behavior, we’ve added a new setting for the PayPal Payments add-on—Order status on partial refund. Find it in Add-ons → Manage add-ons → PayPal payments. By using this setting, you define what status a partially refunded order gets.
• Simplified product feature management. We’ve reworked feature management on the Products → Features page. Now, working with feature groups is clearer: instead of a complicated tree of features and feature groups mixed together, you can see four separate columns: Feature, Group, Categories, and Status. On the right sidebar, you can search for features, filtering them by groups via a drop-down.
• Simplified shipment creation. In CS-Cart, admins can ship an order in a single package as well as in several packages. To create several shipments for a single order, there was a special setting, “Allow multiple shipments for a single order”. We’ve removed that setting and simplified shipment creation. Now, admins create both single shipments and multiple shipments for an order via a single simplified form on the order details page. No more excessive pop-ups and settings.
• Updated API of the FedEx carrier. The updated integration adds new shipping services for this carrier. In Administration → Shipping & taxes → Shipping methods, create a shipping method with a real-time rate calculation, choose FedEx, and see all its services in the Shipping service drop-down.
• Font Awesome icons in the admin panel. To make icons look nice and sharp on Retina displays, we’ve replaced PNG icons with Font Awesome ones.

How to Get CS-Cart 4.4.1

CS-Cart store owners with active upgrade subscriptions upgrade on the Administration → Upgrade center page in their stores. We’re going to distribute upgrade packages in batches during the first week after the release not to overload our servers. After the first week, we’ll be distributing upgrades without limitations. If you don’t see the available upgrade in your Upgrade center, don’t worry—the upgrade is coming to you soon.

If your upgrade subscription has expired, prolong it for another one year for just $144 with the discount code. Go to our website and get the upgrade subscription:

• Select your license and add the upgrade subscription to cart:
  
• Enter the discount code and proceed:
  
• Go through all the checkout steps. On the 3rd step you can also enter the discount code:
  
• Get the upgrade subscription by placing your order:
  

Hope the new features will come in handy in your store! Check out other changes and improvements in the changelog. Share your opinions here in the comments or in the forum.

Report any bugs to the bug tracker. We’ll do our best to deal with all of them.

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Yan Anderson

Head of Content Marketing at CS-Cart | Website

Yan Anderson is the Head of Content Marketing at CS-Cart with over 10 years of experience in the eCommerce industry. He's passionate about explaining complicated things in simple terms. Yan has expertise in building, running and growing eCommerce marketplaces. He loves to educate people about best practices, new technologies, and trends in the global eCommerce industry.