Release Notes Q3 2023

The NextChapter eCommerce platform is constantly being updated and innovated. In the Q3 2023 Release Notes, we have again listed a number of important improvements & optimizations for you.

We are also continuously working on product development. Keep an eye on our blog, LinkedIn page and newsletter so that you don't miss any of our new developments. Want to know more about the release notes or their implementation in your webshop(s) and channels? Feel free to contact us.

We have done a lot of innovations in the past few months in various areas, such as:

1. Frontend features
2. NextChapter functionality and other technical improvements
3. Others

1. Frontend features

Banners on category pages
Bring actions, promotions or other marketing content to the attention of your visitors even better. With this new NextChapter feature you place banners strategically between the products on your category pages. You can configure the banners yourself, such as: the positions of the banners between the products, the categories on which the banners are displayed, multiple banners for various pages, flexible start and end date including time. The banners work real-time and directly from the NextChapter back office.

Menu Block Improvements
You can now even better manage the items in the menu blocks and arrange them as desired to offer customers quick entry points to the right products.

In addition to the automatic menu block layout, there is also the option to manually manage menu blocks yourself. Here you can now define the number of columns yourself and also define up to 3 separate headings per column. You can also manage the names of the headings yourself, giving you maximum flexibility in directing customers to products.

Size recommendation tools

Fashion and footwear webshops can now even better guide their customers in choosing the right size. By using size advice tools. This increases conversion and reduces the number of returns.

NextChapter has integrated two sizing advice tools which we can implement in your webshop. These tools are: Faslet and Easysize.

From the ProductDetailPage customers can open the sizing advice tool where they answer a number of questions which leads to the right size. The customer can place the product in the correct size in the shopping cart directly from the tool.

We also provide the size advice tools with return information, which makes the tools increasingly smart and provides better size advice. Through the size recommendation tools you get valuable information about size choices, fit and other insights which you can use to improve the product offering on your webshop.

Faslet used by Missetam.nl

Easysize used by Filmorebrand.com

Personalization tools Retail Rocket and Clerk.io

We have further extended the integration with the personalization tools Retail Rocket and Clerk. Multiple positions in the webshop have been added where the tools can show personalized product recommendations and content. This increases the number of touchpoints in the web shop where you can offer customers personalized cross and upsell products for more conversions and higher order amounts. The positions in the webshop where personalized products and content can be shown are:

• Homepage: 4 rails

• Category page: above the results

• Category page: below the results

• Product page: 2 rails

• Shopping cart: shopping cart

• Empty shopping cart product rail

• Footer: 2 positions

• My Account page

• Lister page for search term not found

Blog improvements

On the blog overview page that lists all your blogs, you can now show a large image next to the blog items. This allows you to make the blog page more visually appealing.

Sticky cart feature number selection

The sticky cart feature on the Product Detail Page has been improved, allowing customers to directly select the number of products within the feature. This addition improves the ease of use allowing customers to add multiple products to the cart even easier and faster.

Extension forms pre-fill

It is possible to pre-fill forms on the webshop automatically with customer data from the webshop account, such as name, email, address. Now it is also possible to automatically 'Pre-fill' a number of optional fields in a form. For example, debtor number.

Expanding Daisycon integration

Daisycon is one of the largest affiliate marketing networks in Europe. Within the Daisycon integration, NextChapter supports both the regular pixel and the advanced pixel that measures transactions with refferals from the Daisycon network.

The regular pixel measures the total amount. The advanced pixel measures each individual product within a transaction. In this way, sellers can set different commissions per product for publishers in the Daisycon network. Within the Daisycon integration with NextChapter, we have added 2 fields to the product feed for campaign improvement and analytics: gender and Google Shopping ID.

2. NextChapter functionality and other technical improvements

Bulk delete

In the NextChapter CMS, you can now easily delete products in bulk. This allows you to clean up your product catalog faster and keep it current in terms of products. In the Bulk delete feature, you can select products to see whether products have been added to the CMS manually or via an import. This allows you to check that products to be deleted are not added via a product import. This functionality is only important for webshops that do not work with the NextChapter PIM.

New type of promotion

In the promotion module there is a new type of promotion possible. This allows you to offer customers a percentage 'budget' to spend within a certain product category based on the total shopping cart amount.

Example: A shoe webshop also has a 'maintenance items' category. A customer buys €100 worth of shoes. You offer customers 3% budget to spend in the 'maintenance items' category. The customer can then spend €3 or get a discount on only products from the 'maintenance items' category.

3. Other improvements

• Added product data 'EAN' and 'Manufacturer's Item Number' to order confirmation emails. This allows customers to see this data on the product line in the order confirmation.

• Added to the order report the field 'purchase price' at item level. If you have the purchase price in your product data you can see the purchase price in the order report to properly analyze your margin per product/sale.

• Improvements in the KvK API integration for checking the KvK number for B2B webshops. The check now also takes place in the account registration flow.

• Core platform improvements in exports, making exports from the NextChapter platform twice as fast, such as exports for affiliate feeds.

• Pagespeed optimization through core platform improvements in the product detail page.

• API improvements. Various data added to the NextChapter order API endpoints, so that even more order data can be retrieved via the order API in the integration with external systems.