Around the end of July BigCommerce, the #1 rated all-in-one ecommerce service for selling products online, has started to update all shops to version 7.1 – which brings about some long anticipated new features.
Custom URLs can now be setup for all products, categories, web pages and news items in your store. As seen in the screenshot below, you can specify the default URL format and when you add a new product, category, web page or news item, its URL will be created using the format you specified.
With this feature you can optimize your website for SEO and provide an easy to remember link to your users favorite products and vendors. But what if you already have a hundred products in your database, what do you do about all those old links? Well when you edit an existing item, by default a 301 redirect will be setup for the old URL, however you can turn that option off if you like. You can also bulk update every single product, category, web page or news item in your store with a new URL format – making switching everything to the new format types a breeze.
Bandwidth and disk space reporting and tracking has also been added. It’s now really easy to see how much storage and transfer you’re using relative to the plan you’re on. You can view the data in a chart format, or you can view the data in a table so you can see your usage by day. Storage reports on total, database, email, images and other. Transfer reports on total, incoming HTTP, outgoing HTTP, incoming FTP and outgoing FTP.
To boot the logging out and inactivity process has been made a bit more user-friendly as-well. To keep your store PCI compliant (a necessary evil), BigCommerce used to log you out automatically after 15 minutes of inactivity. With BigCommerce 7.1 instead of being logged out, you’ll see a window after 10 minutes of inactivity warning you of an impending logout. If you’re still around, just click the “Dismiss” button and the window will go away. If not, your session will end after 15 minutes of inactivity but you won’t lose your work and will remain on the same screen. The window will simply show the login screen. To resume work after being away from your computer, just fill in your login details and you’ll be logged back in – and you won’t lose any of your work.
Amongst these updates BigCommerce 7.1 also features Bin-Picking Numbers, as-well as the ability to bulk apply an option set to multiple products at once, and 6 brand new store designs to choose from. You can read the full detailed breakdown of all the features at http://www.bigcommerce.com/ecommerce-blog/bigcommerce-7-1-now-live-custom-urls-new-store-designs-friendly-logouts-more/.