2021 shopping upgrades

We have now upgraded your price plans to our new 2021 shopping features! Improvements:

Each sale item can now have many variations that involve just a few changes — think a canvas wrap with many different sizes.
Sale items can now have modifiers like Lustre or Gloss. Or, if using variations and modifiers, think a canvas wrap with 2cm or 4cm frame depths.
Now, all of your sale items are defined once in a master Item Library. Different price plans or Item Groups can include/exclude those items and optionally use custom prices.
Although you can continue to set custom prices on every item, we now offer Price Formulas to consistently manage currency conversion, markup multiplier, min/max markup, and rounding policy. By using these formulas, you can better manage your pricing and also opt into including new lab items for sale as they are defined in the future.
Modern lab-fulfill price plans combine lab-managed physical products with the digital auto-fulfil items from your personal Item Library. This will allow you to more easily sell drop-shipped physical prints alongside your personalised vouchers, bookings, digital downloads and other virtual items.
Previously, stand-alone physical items were sold from a "shop price plan" (not tied to an image collection), whereas normal price plans required an image collection anchor. New price plans remove that distinction, allowing a single plan to sell both photo-linked products and stand-alone items. This eases combined checkout workflows and improves opportunities for cross-selling.
Buyers can now purchase from multiple different top-level collections, performing a single checkout. You can customise how collection-linked discounts are dealt with, but by default we use the Permissive (Keep Customers Happy) approach.
Buyers will sometimes add cart-items from different price plans, which can have different shipping and tax policies. Previously buyers would be asked to complete checkout on their first price plan, or empty their cart, before adding items from another price plan. Now the shopping cart will happily store many items from different price plans at the same time, and items from the most-recently-touched price plan will be "active" and can checkout together. The buyer can then checkout all items from the next price plan. (We have also combined key features of lab-fulfil, self-fulfil, and shop price plans into one, so that in many cases you will be able to serve all your buyer's needs from a single price plan.)
The print lab "By-Invitation Price List" has been replaced by the more versatile "Limit to Users" property on Resold Items. Previously, a lab offering custom products would clone their entire offering, assign it to a particular user, and then oftentimes customise only a tiny fraction of items. This led to maintenance issues. Now, only the individual customised product needs to be assigned to private users, and that assignment can change over time (or the product can become public for all), and it will continue to exist within the larger Resold Item Library.
You can now configure your Shipping Profiles to not ship to certain countries; for details, see Forbid Shipments.
The Delivery Estimate days (i.e. "Estimated delivery time is 7-14 days") can now have both fields set to blank, and we then won't mention any delivery estimate at all during checkout and in the order confirmation email.
Where possible we now show a single page checkout, simplifying the customer experience on all devices. Options such as delivery choices and price changes are updated onscreen in real-time.

When we upgraded any self-fulfil price plan, all its items were moved to your master Item Library (if an exact-match item already existed it was re-used).

When we upgraded any lab-fulfil plan, an appropriate Price Formula will be assigned, but all your custom sale prices have remained unchanged.

Open this standalone items sales page in a new window

Price plans now also contain categories that can be collapsed or expanded. A great way of grouping products together to display options to your customers.

See a categories example.

All accounts will be using the new shopping cart interface by end of September. Our test data is already showing an increase in shopping cart values and an increase in completed carts to checkout.