Storehost Online Commerce Suite news archive -

Sept 1, 2004 - New SEO enhancement - you may now have alternate department, sub-department, item, site, and custom site page titles. This allows for keyword rich page titles which may be a bit to wordy for in site department names or navigation but completely relevant to the search engines.

August 30, 2004 - Now that we are very close to launching Storehost online commerce suite version 2.0 we will begin sharing information on some of its advanced functionality - SH 2.0's highly advanced static HTML page publish will allow for alternate HTML file name publish. What does this mean to you? If you are migrating from another commerce solution and know your product page names i.e. /blue-widget.htm you may assign those same html file names to your new Storehost store item pages - no programming - no hiring a developer to heavily modify (hack) an off the shelf solution.

August 26, 2004 - Department and page icons are now live! Also alternate page and department BG Color/BG Image is also live.

August 23, 2004 - Layout lock is now live! Not only can you save layout sets for development and future use you may lock them to protect your work from being accidentally overwritten!

August 21, 2004 - We are finishing up a few "extras" this weekend - administrators will be able to lock their saved store layout sets to prevent them from being accidentally overwritten. We are also adding a few more functional enhancements to the department attributes such as font color settings, background color/image at the department level.

August 11, 2004 - A few additional layout design options will be rolled out over the next few weeks in conjunction with the custom department, informational and invoice pages (Template manager). New additions are alternate main table backgrounds for departments and site pages and department small icons.

August 10, 2004 - Great news for Storehost merchants and web designers! Building a professional, feature rich online commerce site in Storehost is getting easier every day but as a merchant you may still want a design firm to build your layout for you. To facilitate this process Storehost online commerce suite will soon have a developers interface where merchants can grant access to a designer safely and securely. The developer will be able to create and save preview layout sets for the merchant to approve and publish - all of which will have "0" impact on day to day management of the merchants store. More to follow -

August 6, 2004 - Now that we have true preview live we will be rolling out powerful new design tools such as fully customizable department, item details and invoice pages as well as a multi-view item image gallery. Also coming very soon is a fully customizable check out process - want a one page check-out? No problem.

August 5, 2004 - True dynamic preview/publish is LIVE! Working in preview store no longer immediately affects your live store layout which gives you much more room to experiment with site designs. Auto back-up of current live layout on publish for quick roll back, make back-up layout sets and save layouts for future use like sales events and holidays.

July 21, 2004 - True dynamic preview is almost complete! One of the biggest architectural additions to Storehost Online Commerce Suite 1.5 will be rolling out next week. This puts us one "large" step closer to intelligent static HTML page publishing and Storehost version 2.0 - its coming and its excellent.

July 18, 2004 - Super Hot August Special offer for Yahoo store merchants! We are bringing back the Yahoo store back-up site account for sites up to 6000 items - pay the one time site/account set up fee and pay no monthly fees until January 1, 2005 or until such a time as you need the site to go live. If you activate your objinfo.xml feed we will even import your product data, images and options for you for no additional charge. After January 1, 2005 you may either take your site live or continue the back-up service for only $15.00 a month (aprox .50 a day). Peace of mind has never been more affordable.  Click here to see further details or to order the service.

July 18, 2004 - More new power-tools and pre-programmed store objects are on the way! On the short term development list are two new objects Shop sale items and Shop by price that can easily be added to your store with a mouse click. Additional CSS tools will also be implemented such as global settings for pages, layout areas and objects allowing you to quickly change the color of borders and backgrounds. Many more point and click cascading style sheet tools are in development that will provide unparalleled site design polish for the non-programmer - image is everything.

Also on the way is true dynamic preview / publish. We admit that not having this capability has been a shortcoming of Storehost Online Commerce Suite but this is soon to be a thing of the past. True dynamic preview allows merchants to make site design edits and layout changes with-out effecting their live store. You will be able to pre-view your changes real time as well as place test orders and when you happy with the changes you will "publish" the changes to your database. One really powerful feature of dynamic preview is the Storehost system will save your previous site layout for quickly rolling back the changes you just made. More to follow!

July 9, 2004 - We will be rolling out more PAC (point and click) CSS settings and design tools over the next few weeks giving merchants even more control over the look, feel and polish of their sites. You would spend thousands of dollars with a designer/programmer if you were using a different commerce solution like Yahoo store (RTML) to get the same results as Storehost online commerce suite. Yahoo store requires that you learn a complicated, proprietary programming language called RTML or pay a programmer to do it. Even the most basic site design edits on a Yahoo site require this language.

July 3, 2004 - Additional handling fee setting for international orders will be available on Monday (Live)

July 2, 2004 - Support for Payflow Link  is now available. Our implementation does not have to leave the store to go to the Payflow Link payment pages.

July 1, 2004 - In cart shipping costs preview for international orders is now live.

July 1, 2004 - New Terms and Conditions page and check box for requiring shoppers to agree with your TOC for purchases is live.

July 1, 2004 - We are discontinuing services and application development for third party commerce systems and sites. We are however continuing to build advanced applications for use in conjunction with Storehost Online Commerce Suite and sites hosted on our servers. This does not affect Storehost Online Commerce Suite customers and sites hosted on our servers.

Discontinued hosted services and applications for third party ecommerce applications and sites not hosted on our servers:

• Yahoo store WebTrends Reporting Center 5.0 eBusiness
• Yahoo store WebTrends Reporting Center 5.0 Enterprise
• Yahoo store automated site back up manager & scheduler
• Hosted WebTrends Reporting Center 5.0 eBusiness & Enterprise
• iCSR Live Customer Service Chat
• iClarify site monitoring and alerting service (beta)
• iClarify PPC manager and fraud prevention tools
• iBrowser Diagnostics - Proactive web browser compatibility tools

If you have any questions please contact: Storehost technical support

June 30, 2004: Terms and conditions of sale check box/page will be available by the end of the week. This new check-out feature will require shoppers to check a box stating that they have read and understand the terms of the sale.

June 30, 2004: In cart shipping costs preview is now available for international orders.

June 22, 2004: Soon after we officially launch Storehost online commerce suite 2.0 we will be finishing up a new hosted commerce application called S2c - author your commerce site with S2c and host your automatically generated static HTML pages yourself. Since S2c will only be hosting the cart/secure check out process we will be able to offer this service at a substantially reduced monthly rate - more on this new service soon. Click here to be notified when this service is available.

June 9, 2004: We are putting the finishing touches on our new CSS Navigation Generator - point and click your way to some of the most popular, search engine friendly menu styles or create your own custom CSS navigation in a wizard style interface. Building highly polished site navigation has never been easier. (Live)

May 27, 2004: Department path and ID export to facilitate item categorization for sites with a large number of departments and sub-departments. This new export is also very helpful if you have multiple departments with the same name. (Live)

May 17, 2004: Friday morning (5/21/04) at 12:30 AM, we will upgrading our primary router. At 12:30, Internet access will disconnect for aprox 3 minutes. It may disconnect a second time for 3 minutes at 12:45

May 14, 2004: Putting the finishing touches on the Order Status Manager! This new functionality should be available in your admin Tuesday morning - next in the dev queue is finishing up the IP Address restriction/management tools and integrating them into the process. (Live)

May 11, 2004: We will be tying our order status manager in to our upcoming IP management system for IP Capture and blocking capabilities to assist merchants with fraud prevention.

May 10, 2004: Order update import for tracking and status is being tied to our new merchant definable order status manager which will make managing orders as easy as importing a simple tab delimited file. Our new update import adds the tracking number, sets the order status and automatically emails the customer. (Live)

May 7, 2004: You asked ~ we delivered! We now support two 25,000 item stores on our entry level dedicated commerce server!

February 9, 2004: Master page orientation settings. This new functionality allows you to quickly left, center or right justify your site with-out the use of html code. (early 2.0 feature)

February 3, 2004: New Storehost and Storehost Pro Pricing and New single site dedicated commerce server @ an excellent price!

January 29, 2004: New Storehost architecture allows search engines to spider/crawl your store without the need for a separate html catalog generator. (early 2.0 feature)

January 20, 2004: Integrated Support for Paypal!

January 12, 2004: Support for eBay! iCSR supports html only code for use with auction sites that do not allow or support JavaScript in the description field. Visit our iClarify.biz site for details.