Forum
Perch Shop
Hi
I wondered if this Trello board was being used anymore? It would be great to know if Shop development was being continued or not?
I also wondered about the future of Shop Assistant? Is this still happening?
Thanks in advance,
Jon
Hi
I wondered if this Trello board was being used anymore? It would be great to know if Shop development was being continued or not?
I also wondered about the future of Shop Assistant? Is this still happening?
Thanks in advance,
Jon
It would be great to have an update on Shop in general, it's been a while since there was a significant update to it.
With other ecommerce solutions out there still lacking or out of budget for some clients, Perch Shop could be an easy sell but there are some important features still missing. I would also love to see the API opened up more so developers could plug these holes too.
– Toby
I check in on the Trello board from time to time. It would be good to know if it's going to be updated.
I also check the Trello from time-to-time.
There's not been much activity with Shop, which makes it a hard sell for my clients when they ask about updates and future additions. I too would like to know either way if Shop is low down on the priority list or if the Trello board hasn't been updated.
Though I haven't used Perch Shop yet, I plan to invest time into learning it.
It'd be good to know if the product – as well as its documentation – is still in active development? I'm also very much interested.
Thanks,
Márton Lente
I agree. I have just finished rebuilding a site that I originally did in Joomla/Hikashop. It was more of an exercise really to see if I could work out the shop app, but I've got it all working nicely and will probably switch over soon. But it would be good to know where the Shop is heading.
Hi all!
Yes, Shop is still in development. Shop Assistant progress is a bit delayed due to two factors:
Not that many people have showed an interest. Which is fine, as perhaps it's just not needed in the way we thought it might be. But it doesn't make sense to divert development time into it if there's only going to be a handful of people using it.
A big driver for the service is EU VAT, which is all up in the air since the Brexit vote. We don't know how that's going to affect things (even the UK govt doesn't seem to know) and so it makes sense to wait until that situation is clearer, and a good many of our customers are UK based.
Otherwise the biggest request we have is for recurring subscriptions. That's a tricky one, as Omnipay doesn't support it, and every gateway implements it differently. It's also a big feature that has lots of user touchpoints (creating the subscription, updating card details, dealing with payment failures, creating and modifying plans, switching customers between plans, free trials and so on). The one popular gateway that supports this is Stripe, but it actually does so really poorly when it comes to multi currency and tax rates. To subscribe a customer to a plan you need to create a plan with a fixed amount and currency. That amount will change based on the tax rates that apply to the customer based on (current) EU VAT rules, so you end up needing to create a subscription plan for each unique combination of currency, tax rate and type of subscription. Basically it's a lot of work to implement. When I weigh up the impact of spending that time on this or on something like the Blog app, for example, it's a tough call to say that adding subscriptions is going to benefit the most customers.
If there are smaller scale requests for changes that you'd like to see, feel free to flag them.
Thanks, Drew! Really helpful reply.
I think my main request is easier searching and filtering of products. Shop users with large product catalogues find it hard to filter their catalogue (basically have to manually find through pages, as the main search comes up with so much content on a large site, assets etc).
Ok, thanks Ryan. Could you post a new thread in Suggestions and Shop categories with what you'd like to see for finding products?
What would really help would be examples of actual types problems that would be helpful to solve, e.g. "the client often needs to find products by a given brand in order to adjust their price". That sort of information really helps in figuring out a good solution. Otherwise we have to guess at what "easier" constitutes and we don't have the practical experience of your situation to make the right call there.
Hi Drew
Thanks so much for the update. I really appreciate you taking time to reply.
For Shop, I would love to see:
Product ordering based upon selected container - i.e. a page filtering products based on brand or category.
Multi price change matrix or import/export of single file allowing for maintenance of multiple products with their variants. Once you get over 20 or so products it's a real grind to edit multiple products.
Custom export of sales data – perhaps with added Dropbox app functionality - e.g. Royal Mail Click & Drop app now allows import of CSV to generate postage using Dropbox as a watch folder. Would be great to run a schedule for new orders to drop into that folder.
API and documentation improvements so we can sell Shop to clients more effectively and encourage third party devs to make add ons.
Sale promotion based on category fix :)
Thanks again,
Jon
Thanks Jon - could I ask you do to the same as Ryan and create a new Suggestion thread for each of those? Examples again would be very very useful as I don't fully understand all the jargon contained (e.g. multi price change matrix) so practical examples would really help. Also a note whether something is a control panel feature or something you're trying to achieve on the front end of your site.
I actually thought I'd fixed that already. It may just be queued up for the next release.
Will do, thanks.
Hi Drew - thanks for the reply. Good to know that Shop will continue development as I really enjoyed building with it.
The main thing I would suggest is to improve the documentation. It made trying to learn my way around Shop twice as long, and I have noticed other comments on similar lines. I'm only a Perch novice, so a little more guidance would have been very useful. I got there in the end, but I had to do a lot of digging, and there was much working by trial and error.
Is the Trello board still in use? It's been a useful thing to know what's coming down the Shop tube.
Thanks Drew.
Great to hear there is more planned in the near future for the shop. Thank you for the response, Drew.