It's come down to the wire, but the end is in sight, so I'm pleased to announce that WebGUI 7.5's biggest feature is a complete overhaul of the commerce functionality. The new system is called WebGUI Shop (or just Shop). It's a ground up rewrite of the existing system. We took everything we learned from the first commerce system, as well as some tips from clients, RFE posts, and other online shops, and rolled it into a new very powerful system that should give us many years of growth, and a solid foundation for that growth.

Let's start with the cart. The new cart allows for unique products (can only have one in the cart), per item shipping addresses, a much more flexible tax system, and a much more flexible shipping system. Also, the user will know the full price (including shipping, coupons, and taxes) before they have to log in or enter their credit card info. Yes, you must create a WebGUI account in order to check out. I made this decision because you need to be able to check back on your orders for shipping tracking information, or to be able to cancel a recurring transaction. There's no way to do this securely without an account. The new cart is also highly templatable, giving site owners maximum flexibility. The cart is also very intelligent. It allows all the products in the cart to know about the other products in the cart so that they can act on each other. More on this in a bit. And the cart allows for dynamically configured and dynamically priced products, which the old cart couldn't do.

The cart has several macros now. There is a macro that links to the cart, one that shows the item count in the cart, and another called MiniCart, that allows you to put a small version of the cart into your site design so users can see at all times what they have decided to purchase before checkout.

Skus are the things you can sell in your site, and Skus are just assets. This means you can easily plug in your own product types if you want to build out a custom shop. In addition, because they're assets you add them to your site using the New Content menu, and they have privileges like all other assets. Therefore some products may only be purchasable by people with the right privileges. It also means all your products have a unique human-readable URL, so you can easily send people directly to a product in your newsletters and advertisements.

There are several types of skus that come with WebGUI 7.5. The big dog is Product. Product is a refactoring of the old Product Wobject and the old commerce system product from the admin console. So with this you can create products complete with images, manuals, etc. You can link accessories and related products. You can have product variants like (Green XL T-shirt and Red Small T-Shirt). If you have a complex product you can set up specification and benefits lists. Also, there is a web-based product import/export system so if you have a delimited file containing all your products from your inventory management system you can quite easily import your products without having to manually create them. Speaking of inventory management, the product sku keeps track of how many you have on hand, and won't let you oversell. And you can export that information from the products import/export system so that you can import it back into your inventory management system if you like.

Subscriptions have also been converted from an admin console item into a sku asset. However, other than that they remain virtually unchanged.

There's also a new donation sku. This is probably the simplest sku around, but it allows your users to type in how much they want to spend, and then adds that to the cart. This asset shows off the dynamic configuration/pricing subsystems of the cart and sku.

The event manager (or EMS for short) has been rewritten from the ground up as well. Badges, Tickets, Ribbons, and Tokens are all now subclasses of sku. The Event Manager is now easier to manage, search, and use, and it's all ajaxified which makes it very fast even when running large conventions that have thousands of individual tickets you can register for. The EMS is also a great example of how skus can interact with each other in the cart. A ribbon is effectively a coupon for tickets, so if you add a certain ribbon to your cart it will search the cart looking for related tickets, and automatically adjust the price of all those tickets. And you must have a badge to buy tickets, ribbons, or tokens. So if you remove the badge from your cart, the badge automatically removes the ribbons, tokens, and tickets related to it as well.

There is now a flat discount coupon. This allows you to give a percentage off the total price of the cart if the user spends over a certain amount. Did I mention that coupons are a just a sku like any other product? That means users don't have to mess around with messy coupon codes. They just add the coupon to their cart like any other product. Want a coupon to only work for certain users? Then set it's group to view for those users. Want only newsletter subscribers to be able to use the coupon? Then hide the coupon from casual viewing on your site, and include a direct URL to it in the newsletter. This coupon is just a small example of what is possible. In the future I expect 2 for 1 coupons, bulk discount coupons, coupons on specific skus, etc. Or for that matter, there will likely be many of you that write your own.

We also introduced a feature called In-Shop Credit. If an item is refunded, it will be refunded with in-shop credit by default. This encourages your visitor to respend the money in your shop rather than spending their money elsewhere. In addition, you can use in-shop credit. In addition, I could see this concept being applied to a coupon. For example, add this coupon to your cart, and get $10 of in-shop credit for your next purchase. That would encourage your users to come back and buy from you again.

There is also a vendor management system, which allows you to tie skus to vendors. This way you can do consignment products, and pay vendors at the end of the month for any products that were sold in your shop. For that matter you could do a mini-Amazon type shop. Unfortunately for now this subsystem doesn't come with any reports, it just does the tracking, so you'll need to write some SQL reports if you want to use this feature. But in a future release we'll be adding in reports, and hopefully also tying it into an automated payment system like PayPal so that you don't even have to cut a check to your vendors, they'll automatically get paid when a sale is made.

The payment gateway system has gotten a facelift as well. The new system makes it easier to write payment plugins, and will allow for off site payment systems like PayPal and Google Checkout to be integrated. We ran out of time otherwise PayPal would have been integrated in this release. But we hope to do it in the near future.

The transaction management system was also rebuilt. With the new system you can easily search transactions. And each transaction gets a human readable order number. Also, you can set shipping tracking numbers on each item in a transaction, as well as set individual items to Shipped/Cancelled/Backordered, etc. And you can keep private notes about transactions right on the transaction, which can help the whole post-sale process on problematic orders. And finally you can issue refunds and cancel recurring transactions right from the transaction manager.

There's even more I could tell you about with the new shop, but I'm sure you're tired of reading by now. The beta containing all these goodies will be out on June 12th. Then you'll be able to see for yourself. I hope you're as happy as I am about the prospects these new features deliver. The future of commerce in WebGUI has never been so bright. And the future is coming in the next beta!