Ucommerce 9.5: A brand new look and an improved workflow for working with promotions

Following the Ucommerce 9.5 launch event from earlier this month, the Promotions App update is here!

The new Promotions app is the next phase of our journey to redesign and re-implement the user interfaces of our Campaigns and Promotions modules.

A heads up to long-time Ucommerce users, there are a few noteworthy re-brand. All intended to make it easier to find your way around Ucommerce. So we hope you enjoy them as much as we do!

A new way of managing your promotions

Promotions, previously known as Campaign Items, have been removed from the left-side tree navigation and found their home inside the new Promotions experience. Each campaign you edit will have a list of its Promotions where you can browse, organize and edit them. With drag and drop sorting, and the now well-known editing paradigms in place, this should feel familiar and much faster to use.

New terminology and improved functionality for handling discount

Targets (Act column) are now called Criteria, and Awards are now Discounts to better represent what they are actually about. If the customer meets the listed criteria, the configured discount will be applied to their basket. All come with new editors and a faster, handier way to work with (Eg. search for the product you’d like to add as a free gift by name) 

A new editing experience for handling Campaigns

Campaigns will remain called as they are, but that does not exempt them from getting a new editing experience.

All in all, the new Promotions app will take the place of the legacy Marketing node in the left-side tree navigation starting with 9.5.0.

Now for what is missing:

• Custom criteria and discounts that were custom developed for your shop will not be editable via the new interface just yet. They will not show up, letting you edit all out-of-the-box ones, however. A link to the legacy editor is included akin to the Products app for when you need to edit custom criteria and discounts.
• The only criterion missing from the redesign is the one allowing you to pick a Store for which to apply the discounts. All use cases this was being used for are covered by configuring your Campaigns to be available for only the stores you want.

…oh, and speaking of - you can now associate a campaign with multiple stores, instead of having to pick between a single one or all of them!

Breaking changes

Apart from the Promotions App revamp, Ucommerce 9.5 also includes a few breaking changes. With the new version, we developed a better way to filter out logging messages from Ucommerce, improved error messages originating from the Search Provider (Bolt), and much more.

If you want to see if there are any adjustments that you will have to make to your code when upgrading, head to our release notes

More improvements and fixes

• Improved product list performance for large multilingual stores.
• It is now possible to set up a definition field for selecting multiple images or multiple content items from your CMS of choice by using two new Data Types that come out-of-the-box. This was possible before but required setup and was not very apparent.
• Fixed an error that would show up if you left your website idle on one of our new apps (e.g. Products) while the Umbraco 8 login timed out.
• Changing the SKU of a product will now correctly update each of its variants with the new SKU while previously it would stay as it was, possibly leading to data inconsistency.
• Taxes for when products are indexed to Bolt are now correctly calculated using our ITaxService, which means custom implemented tax rules will be taken into account.
• Testing payments with PayEx (in test mode) works again.
• Eliminated a few possible exceptions when installing and running Ucommerce on Sitefinity to minimize the need for manual steps involved. (Primarily around initial indexing)
  …and several other bug fixes!

If you are in doubt about anything or have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us. You can reach us at [email protected].