BV Commerce 2017 release details

Here is the complete list of new features, enhancements, and bug fixes in BV Commerce 2017. This list is relative to the last release, BV Commerce 2015 SP2.

New Features

• 'Sale' badge overlay on product thumbnails (like "New" badge) for products that are on sale
• Sale price displayed separately from site price so users can easily see the price before sale
• Create sales by manufacturer and sales by vendor
• Sort products on category pages by best selling and highest rating
• Display review stars on category pages and other grids
• "MPN" and "UPC" product fields--both are searchable and used by the data feeds
• "Regular Price" product field--this price is between List Price and Site Price so you can show that your Site Price has been further discounted. Another good use for this is permanent discounts or closeouts.
• Price Group rule-based pricing -- now they're smart enough to handle varying margins, exclusion, etc.
• Import/Export Type Properties as part of product import/export
• Automated after-sale product review request emails
• Automated back-in-stock customer notification emails
• Ability to link directly to a product variant (with the choices pre-selected) with a query string--implemented for Google Shopping and other data feeds
• Orphaned Products feed--quickly identify products not associated to any category and update them
• Export now supports splitting out address XML fields into distinct fields (e.g. Street, City, State, Zip, etc)
• Facebook tracking pixel
• Facebook product feed
• Bing UET tracking--replaces Microsoft AdCenter tracking
• Bootstrap 3 responsive theme
• "CategoryMenu" category field--provides the ability to define an alternate name for a category for menus

Enhanced

• "Buy One Get One" offer can now be configured to require one or all defined products to be purchased to qualify
• Kits
• Kit component products can now have choices/modifiers/inputs
• Product Type and Type Properties support
• Additional images support
• Short Description field
• Kit details now displayed on One Page Checkout Plus and admin order edit page
• Updated PayPal and Payflo Pro integration libraries
• Google Shopping feed updates
• Conforms to latest requirements
• Link directly to a product variant (with the choices pre-selected)
• GTIN support via new UPC field
• Added sale price field
• More fields supported via Type Properties
• Bing Shopping feed now conforms to latest requirements and supports Type Properties
• Google Remarketing tag can now be setup through admin
• Added ability to NOT set/select a MultiChoice Type Property dropdown when editing a product
• Quickly change order status in admin via dropdown
• Added "SKU" and "ProductName" fields to inventory export to make it easier to use (rather than just bvin values)
• More robust data validation for Product import/export
• UPS rating now supports customer classication (daily, retail, standard list, and rates associated with shipper number)
• Added pager for File Vault

Performance

• Faster application startup
• Increased speed of inventory checks--most noticable on category and search results pages
• Added per-request caching of User account
• Faster loading of products variants (Catalog.InternalProduct.GetCombinationProducts/GetActiveCombinationProd functions)
• Admin product variant edit page loads faster
• Added 'User" property to TaxContext to prevent multiple lookups in workflow steps
• Disabled unused ASP.NET modules to reduce unnecessary server processing
• Cart cleanup process improvements for stores with inventory tracking enabled
• Extended default static resource (images, style sheets, JavaScript, etc) cache length from 1 day to 30 days

 Security

• TLS 1.2 supported for third-party integrations (e.g. PayPal, Authorize.Net, UPS, FedEx, etc)
• Mitigate session fixation (stealing an authenticated user's session) attacks
• Use secure cookies for critical cookies when using site-wide SSL
• Use HttpOnly cookies to mitigate XSS (cross-site scripting) attacks
• Admin image browser allowed renaming file extensions
• File Upload product input permitted file types now adminable
• File Upload product input shows full uploaded file path in admin only
• Ensure ASP.NET tracing is disabled

Bug Fixes

• Advanced Search did not work with keyword-less searches--now falls back to standard search in this scenario
• Keyword-less searches displayed no results when paging
• Order total offers could cause a negative order total
• Offer "not be combined with other promotional codes" setting did not work properly in all cases
• Free shipping offers did not work properly with the "not be combined with other pomotional codes" setting of other offers
• Certain pages did not redirect to SSL when site-wide SSL was enabled
• Non-responsive cross-sell and up-sell interstitial pages (between product and cart pages) do not add item(s) to cart
• Disabled autofill/autocomplete on One Page Checkout Plus account creation "username" field to prevent accidental filling with email address which then trips password check on optional account creation
• Category Menu Plus content block did not accept legacy integer category ID values for "Curent Category ID" setting
• Removing product from category in admin causes 404 error in some browsers
• When changing a product's Product Type and then changing it back the original Type Property values were not retained 
• When deleting a product make sure it is removed from the Cross-Sell(s) of other products--previously left orphaned data that caused an error when viewing the Up-Sell/Cross-Sell admin page
• Creating a kit using an existing product or kit SKU generated a server error rather than a friendly validation error
• Admin inventory page "Track Inventory" show/hide checkbox did work properly (e.g. it would be checked but would not show the qty checkboxes below it)
• Loyalty points were not applied to PayPal Express orders placed from cart
• Tax wasn't being charged on shipping for PayPal Express orders placed from cart
• "Payment Complete" workflow can run twice (causing Avalara taxes to be commited twice) for PayPal orders set to charge at checkout
• Placing an order via the admin used the admin user's affiliate ID (if they had one) for the order
• Admin New Order page requires state/region when they are specified for a country
• User was able to edit a line item of their placed order using a product page URL with the LineItemId query string
• Google sitemap did not include product medium image
• Google Remarketing control wasn't properly quoting string arrays for products. Also added escaping for SKUs that contain single quotes.
• Google Shopping feed allowed products with many additional images to exceed field length limit
• Redirector was unable to redirect URLs with a trailing slash (e.g. /media-center/)
• Auto-rewritten category URLs for CustomLink and CustomPage types are now 301 redirected to their actual URLs rather than resolving to a category template page. Also now 301 redirect these pages when accessed using unrewritten URLs to a category template page.
• Looking up a product's inventory, when there was no inventory record, sometimes caused an orphaned record to be created when adding inventory
• Removed lazy-loading of Order.Items (line items) property due to issues
• RMA was created before a user completed the RMA process causing duplicate RMAs or inability to restart process
• Package Rules shipping method did not recalculate package dimensions and weight after splitting a package
• Non real-time shipping methods did not implement GetRates function that takes a ShippingGroup collection--this caused the methods to not return rates when using with the Package Rules method
• UPS package dimension measurements did not support metric units--US (in) units were always used
• UPS service similar to Fedex SmartPost did not support weights less than 1 oz
• UPS rating did not correctly set a 'tube' package as non-machineable
• County address field label was not hidden when County dropdown was hidden
• Changing a user's password from the user edit admin page did not prevent reusing current password for encrypted and hashed passwords 
• Admin product review editor did not save changes to user name and email address fields
• ASPX pages in sub-folders redirect to the Closed page using a URL relative to the sub-folder, rather than the root, resulting in a 404
• Mailing List Signup content block in Foundation theme showed error message by default when custom error message was not set
• Null choice/modifier options displayed on "Bvc5ChoiceGrid" product template (or templates that used the VariantsGridDisplay control)
• Errors occurred when more than 255 marketing offers were added
• Duplicate SortOrder value in "Process New Order" workflow--this update resets ALL workflow SortOrder values to fix duplicates and remove gaps
• InternalProduct.Clone function inserted additional image (bvc_ProductImage) records even if the cloned product wasn't saved
• Google Shopping feed edit page caused object reference error for some international merchants
• Affiliate tracking occassionally caused object reference errors to be reported in Audit Log
• Admin image pathing used absolute URLs (i.e. "/") in some places which caused broken images (and a broken link) when running the application in a sub-folder
• File Upload extension validation was not case insensitive (e.g. ".jpg" was permitted but not ".JPG")
• Duplicate replacement tags were shown in the email and print template editor

Developer

• .NET Framework 4.6.2
• Added theme suppot for WebP button images
• Corrected pathing issues that prevented website project from being compiled (though no errors occurred at runtime). This also allows a theme to be duplicated without needing to change any paths.
• Added [[VendorManufacturer.Address]], [[User.BillingAddress]], [[User.ShippingAddress]], and [[User.FullName]] replacement tags
• Added Taxes.CalculateTaxForProduct method for future product pricing + tax (e.g. for VAT requirements)
• Added Product.BackOrderedQuantity property
• UserAccount merge methods (and corresponding WebService API) now merge TaxExempt, PricingGroupId, and IsSalesPerson if they are unset on destination account and set on source account (unless overwrite parameter is set)
• Redirector is now disabled on fresh installs
• ProductDisplayData class has many new price properties
• Solution file updated for Visual Studio 2015 and IIS Express SSL support enabled
• Added better support for alernate port numbers
• Legacy Yahoo tracking disabled
• SingleProductDisplay control changes to allow overriding properties from theme and new property for hiding 'details' button