dynambee

In the back office it is possible to choose how many days the "NEW" badge is displayed on newly added items. The default is 20 days. However, where is the date stored that this 20 days is calculated from? I thought it would be in `tb_products`, specifically the `date_add` column but setting that date to an older date does not make the NEW badges disappear. I ask because when building a new site I only want the NEW badge to appear on actually NEW items, not on items that previously existed in our product catalog that just happen to be recently uploaded to a new site.

Thanks for the reply! I will do a full server backup and attempt 10.4. Once I'm comfortable with it I'll report back if everything is working OK. Many test & dev sites running on this server, wish me luck...

Hi @lesley, do you know if MariaDB 10.3 and/or 10.4 are safe to use with TB 1.1.x bleeding edge? I want to use recursive SQL queries which require 10.2 (currently running 10.1) but if I'm going to upgrade I figured I may as well go with the newest I can. 10.4 seems to be considered stable these days, so...

That makes a lot more sense, and explains why I could install with that error displayed but OP could not.

The trouble with this is that I sell items that range in value from a few cents (small parts) to $5000 and sometimes more. I’m happy to give 10% off a $50 order but not 10% off a $5000 order. Certainly for the coupon to the friend having a delay of a couple of weeks or a month would be a good idea.

Yes. I'd like to be able to set a minimum order value though. Don't want people making $2 orders and then giving them and their friend each a $5 coupon. So ideally friend gives out referral code, and then if the person spends (for example) $50 or more then they get a $5 coupon and their friend gets a $5 coupon. It could be integrated with the points system so the person making the order gets $5 worth of points that they can use on their current order and the friend gets $5 worth of points added to their point balance. That way a separate system to manage the coupons isn't necessary.

@vincentdenkspel summed it up perfectly, and with a whole lot fewer words than I would likely have ended up using. @wakabayashi, I'm excited about the new version coming out and am very grateful for all your hard work on this!

The checkout page he is showing is what Niara does on mobile. It just uses the desktop checkout screen, and mobile users have to swipe back and forth to see anything or make any changes.

I just bought Panda for an upcoming site and am very pleased! I'm likely to buy more licenses in the future. I hope you can find time to keep working on the TB version of Panda and perhaps make Transformer compatible with TB as well.

This should force the optional tests to return as OK, regardless of if any of them are not okay or not: public function checkOptionalTests() { return 'success'; } The optional checks test for GZIP being enabled for faster web serving and to see if TLS 1.2 is enabled. Forcing a return of success will skip these two tests.

I have never used Facebook ads so I don't have any first hand experience with advertising on the platform. That said, is it not possible to create Facebook ads that link directly back to your website and not to a Facebook page? If it is possible to advertise a website then carefully using very targeted Facebook ads for a webstore might be effective. The key is the targeting though, really have to know exactly who you want to target or your ad budget can get burned through super-fast with no results.

Was this after following the second set of instructions I provided, the ones in this comment? If so then I don't know how to advise. @lesley, this seems to be something that needs to be rectified in a new release soon if it is blocking people from installing TB.

Do they all follow a pattern like this? If they do then it will be very easy to generate a new htaccess file with a text editor or a little coding.

It doesn't work out of the box properly if you assign carriers to specific products, and then customers try to buy items that have different carrier assignments. Amazon is a good example of a company that manages this perfectly for complex shipping situations. What they do is have different data tables for orders and shipments. Each order is split into shipments automatically by the Amazon system. If all items can be shipped together then only one shipment is created. However if items are shipping from different Amazon warehouses or they require different types of shipping then Amazon automatically (and with no input from the customer) splits one order into multiple shipments. This might even be if you buy 5 of the same thing and 3 come from one warehouse while 2 come from another. A single large order could have 2, 3, 4, 5 etc shipments, all managed automatically by their cart. With a site the size of Amazon this splitting can get complicated quickly, but even for a small site with 7 or 8 different types of shipping it can get complicated quickly. It looks simple to the customer because Amazon has done a great job with their cart but behind the scenes they have a lot of shit going on to get this right. I would love to see TB migrate to this type of shipping system, including allowing orders to be split or combined into single or multiple shipments in the back office. Then if a customer orders 20 of something but only 11 are available for immediate shipment 11 can be shipped today and the remaining 9 can be shipped next week when more stock arrives. (Unsurprisingly Amazon supports this, too.)

Okay. Just that a sudden, dramatic drop in orders can be a sign that something about the site is broken and blocking people from ordering. I guess if all your traffic comes from new customers following Google (or forum) links then it might hurt a lot with the new cart for a while. Any repeat customers should still be able to shop, though...

Are you sure your site is even working properly for orders? Have you tested it completely with the PayPal (or other payment system) sandbox? Did you make sure that after testing was done that you turned the sandbox off and enabled real payments? Have you had a friend to a full proper order for a low-cost item and complete payment as a test? (Do not do this yourself as you might violate payment provider TOS.)

I have never found a way to make the shipping system work properly when there are items with different types of shipping assigned to them and in the cart at the same time. The TB system does not allow multiple carriers to be chosen for one order so if you have one item that only offers carrier ABC and another item that only offers carrier XYZ then everything goes to shit. Even if one item has carrier ABC and the other allows ABC or XYZ things get weird. The more complicated the options, the weirder it gets. In the end we gave up. We no longer assign shipping carriers to items but instead had a module developed for us that allows us to limit the available shipping options based on what is in the cart during the checkout process. When items require a specific type of shipping we just set their weight to be extremely low so they don't impact what types of shipping the customer can choose for the other items in the cart. We include the cost of shipping in the item price, add a note in the description that the item offers "free" shipping, and also mention that it will always ship by XYZ shipping type, regardless of the shipping type chosen during checkout. Then our in-office systems manage the outbound shipping make sure items are shipped as needed. Every shopping cart has some weak points. TB is absolutely incredible in many ways. Top performance, very stable, really good API, responsive project managers, etc, etc. I am confident that it is the best platform for us, but the shipping system is a weak point, for us it is the main weak point. However now that we have given up trying to make the shipping system work how we think it should work but instead found ways to make our systems adapt to what TB can manage, things are okay. In fact I'm actually quite happy with how things are working in the shipping area now and probably wouldn't make any changes to it even if we could.

If you think the source of your problem is the revws module then you are likely to get better answers in the active thread about that module. If you're not sure what the problem might be then you probably need to narrow it down a bit, or maybe consider hiring someone to help narrow it down, or even to fix it. When you moved from Zencart to TB did you make sure all your old URLs properly redirected to the right products on your new server? If not then you are probably losing out on traffic and potential customers coming from search engines and from old links around the web. It is not such an easy thing to switch shopping carts but over the long term it's best to have a solid platform to work form.

Have you asked @datakick about this problem? As it's his (excellent) module he may have some good insight into what's going on. He mentioned on the forums that he is on holiday right now so you may not get a reply right away. As far as the GTINs go, have you had a look in the tb_product database table to make sure your EANs are stored in the ean13 column, where they should be?

The real problems happen, in my experience, when you have more than one item in the cart that don't have shared shipping options. When this happens the shipping total can often seem nonsensical, the presented shipping carriers can be strange, or the system can give errors about no carrier being available. We got around this problem with automation, a LOT of carriers, and some custom modules. We have five actual shipping carriers that we use. What we create are five shipping carriers per country that we ship to, complete with all the appropriate weight ranges. Then we use a custom module to limit carrier availability based on custom cart rules. We do not assign carriers to items as it makes things a huge mess. We manage free shipping by having near-zero weight items cost $0 to ship and then assigning a weight of 1g to those items. It's a hacked together system to get around the shipping system limitations, but it works.

How many carriers do you have set up? Have you manually assigned certain carriers to certain items? Do you have more than one item in the shopping cart when you go to check out? If you are basing your shipping on item cost, why not set the item weights to zero? Overall TB is a great platform but the shipping system inherited from PS is probably the weakest point. It's not very good at managing things for complex shipping situations.

I'm not sure that the two words necessarily have perfectly separate uses when it comes to web use. However in my understanding generally a referral would be when a new customer makes an account on the website using a link with a referrer code in it. Usually in this case the referrer gets a percentage of the sales of the person they referred (maybe for a fixed period of time) or they get a one time payment. Especially in the case of a one time payment the new customer usually needs to spend a certain amount in the store before that payment is made. Otherwise it is quite ripe for abuse where people make new accounts with fake names & emails but never purchase anything. Affiliate links are usually links to specific products. For example product reviews often contain affiliate links to that product on Amazon or other sites. If a customer comes to the site via an affiliate link and then buys something, the person who sent them to the site gets a percentage of that sale. The rules for affiliate links are often fairly complicated. For example, the person coming to the site must not have visited the site within the last X number of days (checked with cookies), and they have to purchase something within X days of the affiliate link visit (again controlled by cookie). Sometimes the payout is only for the product they were specifically referred to, other times it can be for anything they buy within that X day period.

From the look of the NYT article nothing changes at all until July of next year. At that point the US can start to set their own rates for incoming parcels. Starting from January 2021 other countries that have heavy mail volumes will be able to do the same thing. The thing is, this might not change much with regards to shipping costs from China. The Chinese gov't may decide to just absorb the extra postal costs themselves and not pass it along to their customers as higher rates. Alternatively businesses with tight connections to the CCP may see their rates stay low while businesses with more independent leaders may see their postal rates go up.

Those are all fantastic additions that will make the module more flexible for shop owners. I really like the referral / affiliate functionality idea. For referrals, will there be a way to award points to the referrer only after their newly referred customer spends $X amount in the store?

I guess if you can give a rough outline of what you are changing then maybe people will have some ideas that can be included in those changes?