April 2019

Lots of great progress has been made relating to management and checkout of bookable resources, and products. 

New Features

Out of Band Payment Gateway

One way to minimise friction for your buyers and sellers is to allow them to specify their own custom payment method. It turns out many places in the world have totally different payment gateways. Stripe is only supported in a subset of countries, and while Paypal is supported in more countries, a key feature for sellers is payout, that is the ability to have payments settled to a bank account, is still only supported in a subset of countries. As a work around for this situation, and also the case when you just don't want the hassle or overhead of enforcing transactions take place on your platform we've implemented an 'Out of band' Payment Gateway option. 

This means that instead of sellers linking their Stripe or Paypal, you can still let users buy things from them and pay manually, or out of band (off the site). You could specify bank details, a bitcoin or other cryptocurrency address, a postal address to receive checks, a PayPal email address, or anything else you can think of. Then when customers add items to their cart and checkout they'll see these payment options and instructions. When you receive payment, you can easily mark a payment as received.

Review feature documentation

Updates

• Bookings - User experience improvements based on user feedback for adding multiple items to cart
• Checkout - Graceful handling of payment processing errors and feedback to users added
• Checkout - Address validation and auto completion - When an order is manually added by a Seller, the address is now validated for shipping and tax purposes (depending on shipping and tax calculation back-end services).
• Checkout - Improved the way how address autocomplete and validation works during checkout (shipping and billing address)
• Checkout - Tax categories mapping - Support for custom tax categories mapping has been added. From now on sellers can pick an appropriate category which is mapped behind the scenes to a valid tax jar category.
• Checkout - Utilising the new 'Out of Band Payment Gateway' option we added support for "Pay on Arrival" then checkout out bookable resources.
• Events - See all participants that are attending an event below the fold
• Events - Added ability to 'Leave' an event, in the event you are no longer interested in coming. This includes providing an optional comment that is visable in the admin.
• Homepage - Made it configurable what the default active social feed tab is on the homepage
• Homepage - Can be dynamically populated with featured user content. e.g. Latest Products, Events near Me, Popular Rides.
• Homepage - Can be dynamically populated with latest platform blog posts.
• Homepage - Tiles on the homepage can be swiped left/right on mobile devices
• Messages - Messages are displayed in admin panel and details of each message registered in the system, such as which objects or users it relates to.
• Operations - We have upgraded our servers to be more performant. The change should be noticeable - faster response times, better performance for end users.
• Orders - A list of orders can now be split into 1 or more sections, for example: Upcoming Bookings and Archived Bookings
• Orders - Can be sorted by arbitrary criteria, for example: 'Archived bookings' can be bookings with departure date earlier than today's date. They are sorted by departure date in descending order, then by arrival date in ascending order.
• Products - Product Categories sorted alphabetically in root categories and alphabetically in respective child categories
• Profiles - Improved the way how address autocomplete works in user profiles
• Profiles - Added ability to customise Profile banner image opacity
• Waiting List - Registered emails are automatically synced to Sendgrid lists for marketing campaigns.
• Waiting List - Added the ability to have three profiles. e.g. Sellers, Customers, Service Providers. Collected data is pushed to a matching list in Sendgrid.

Bug Fixes

• Bookings - Fix pricing calculations in booking management
• Bookings - Improve validation of booking data to handle edge cases
• Booking - We had a regression issue where hitting "Save" button on editing booking items screen caused no action
• Cart - Resolved bug that shipping cost was not refreshed on the right hand side summary, when user selected shipping option and clicked "Update cart".
• Cart - Resolved bug where after calculating taxes for a cart in the shipping address step, when user went back to the cart, calculated taxes were wrong. Now the totals with tax is displayed.
• Cart - Leaving checkout and going back to cart issue
• Cart - Resolved issue that after buyer paid for an order and went to the cart, a previous product was still displayed. Now the cart is cleared after successful order processing.
• Checkout - Restrict sellers from buying products. Notification is displayed that a customer profile is requried. Later this will be improved to transparently switch to the Customer profile.
• Checkout - UX Improvement Updated message when redirecting to log in during checkout to be more meaningful.
• Invoices - There was an error in displaying invoices for orders added manually by sellers, caused by not having a payment reference.
• Events - Issue when leaving a ride was marking all riders left has been fixed
• Payment Gateway - There was an error raised when User wanted to connect with Stripe but they clicked "Cancel". Now when user cancels process, they are redirected back to profile with appropriate message
• Search - Fixed bug related to indexing bookable resources in the search index causing title not being refreshed when changed has been fixed
• Waiting List - Resolved that sometimes not all the custom fields were passed to sendgrid.