Hello! We have released CS-Cart and Multi-Vendor 4.10.4. It is a patch release, so it focuses on bug fixes and small improvements. As usual, the full list of changes is in the documentation. In this article, we’ll cover the most important changes.
Strong Customer Authentication
The main change relates to strong customer authentication (SCA) which becomes a requirement in Europe on September 14, 2019. In version 4.10.4, we have added 3-D Secure support for Stripe, Stripe Connect, and SagePay.
If you use other payment methods, don’t worry: not every payment method in CS-Cart needs to be updated.
- Some payment methods redirect your customers straight to the gateway website (or show a pop-up from that website). Customers enter credit card details there, make the payment, and return to your store. In that case, SCA is usually the responsibility of the payment gateway. For example, here is how PayPal describes it.
- Other payment methods allow customers to enter card data on your website, as if those fields were part of the site. In that case, strong customer authentication must be implemented on the CS-Cart side, even if only to redirect customers to the gateway side for the extra confirmation.
Currently, the following payment methods that allow customers to enter card data on the checkout page support 3-D Secure:
- Stripe
- Stripe Connect (in Multi-Vendor)
- SagePay
- Global Payments
- PayFlow Pro
- PayPal Adaptive Payments
- PayPal Pro
Multi-Vendor: Variations and Vendor Plans
Multi-Vendor has the Vendor Plans add-on. It allows you to create plans for vendors, with various costs and limitations. One of the possible limitations is the number of products that a vendor can add.
To understand what it has to do with variations, it’s important to understand the difference between “products” and “catalog items”. In old variations (and in option combinations before them) these terms were synonyms. Different colors and sizes of a T-shirt were parts of the same product. All variations of a product shared one catalog item.
In version 4.10.1, every variation became a separate product. The vendors who used variations ended up at a disadvantage:
- They suddenly got more products (probably exceeding the limits of their plan).
- They didn’t necessarily benefit from it—not all variations are supposed to be shown as separate products on the storefront.
That’s why we made Multi-Vendor 4.10.4 count the new variations as the old variations were counted in 4.9.x:
- All catalog items ( “variations as separate products”) are now counted as separate products.
- All variations of a catalog item (“variations as one product”) are now counted as one product.
These aren’t all the changes—see the full list in the documentation.
The upgrades to version 4.10.4 are already available. As usual, for the first few days after the release we hand out upgrade packages in limited numbers, but then we lift that restriction. So if you don’t see this upgrade in your Upgrade Center yet, please try again later.