Welcome to the last blog post of the year! What’s new to tell after 46 blog posts in 2021? Quite a lot! Because we’re taking the turn of the year as an opportunity to reveal a few of our resolutions for 2022: We’re unfolding parts of our roadmap and highlighting some of the goals we’re working towards with current projects. So hold on tight and let’s go!
Spoiler alert!
Today we are giving you a little insight into our programming workshops. In January, we will continue the series of our popular developer diaries and will probably come up with hot news about our point of sale system JTL-POS. In the developer diaries, our programmers themselves have their say and give you exciting insights into the ongoing development process. Check our blog regularly to make sure you don’t miss a new issue!
The quickest source of information for current projects is certainly the roadmap on our website. For those who don’t know it yet: The roadmap shows you our most important ‘construction sites’ at a glance, organized by concept, development and beta phase. Thanks to regular updates, you can always see the latest development status here.
In this article, we are deliberately focusing on a selection of our projects. If you are missing certain products, modules or features, you should definitely take a look at our roadmap.
JTL-Wawi 1.6 sets the direction
Every roadmap begins with an assessment of the current situation. And we are currently focusing on JTL-Wawi 1.6. The eagerly awaited version of our ERP has been in the open beta phase for several weeks and, of course, (almost) everything in 2022 revolves around the upcoming stable release.
Listing 2.0, the new order details, purchase order proposals, partial invoices, Unicode support, JTL-Wawi App for on the go – your wait for new core features will soon be over. Many of you are certainly also looking forward to the numerous innovations that JTL-Wawi 1.6 will provide for other JTL products: The “Identical orders” shipping module in JTL-WMS or the returns processing in the JTL-Fulfillment Network are just a few examples.
You can read all the details about the new functions in our recently published blog post on the launch of the open beta. Or you can download the new version for free right now!
New marketplace interface
The programmers of our marketplace interface have also been hard at work this year. They have been working flat out on our new generic API, which you can use to integrate not ‘just’ eBay and Amazon, but any sales channel you like into JTL-Wawi.
Upload listings, collect orders, process shipping, payments and cancellations – no matter which online marketplaces you want to sell on. Where some of you have previously stumbled across a patchwork of island systems, we are paving the way for seamless and smooth integration.
As an integrated component of JTL-eazyAuction, the interface will meet all the requirements for you to systematically expand your multichannel trade with JTL. The necessary functions and additional fields recently required fundamental conversion work in JTL-Wawi. However, we are now well equipped for most marketplace-specific requirements.
If you would like to read more in-depth information on the technical background of the marketplace interface, which temporarily operated under the working title JTL-SCX, we recommend our developer diary.
The integration with Kaufland.de (formerly Real.de) has been freely available to all pilot customers since JTL-Wawi 1.6.31.0. We use your feedback to continuously improve the interface with the aim of providing you with a powerful and reliable interface for the stable release of JTL-Wawi 1.6. And not only for Kaufland.de, but then also for the sales giant OTTO.de.
We will be adding other popular platforms in 2022 and beyond. As our interface is an open system, third-party providers can also develop and provide additional marketplace connections. Our vision for the next few years is that you can simply serve any online marketplace on which you want to list listings directly from JTL-Wawi without any complex interface configuration.
Happy Birthday, JTL-Shop 5!
Don’t you think that this year – despite some corona-related adversities – has flown by again? We’re noticing this with regard to our shop system JTL-Shop 5, which celebrated its first birthday last week!
Since then, JTL-Shop 5 has fully proven itself: The chic NOVA template, the easy page design with the OnPage Composer and the great expandability in the JTL-Extension Store will not be missed by any shop operator who has upgraded to version 5. The outstanding customer experience provided by the shop system has not only impressed retailers, but also the jury of the Shop Usability Awards, who awarded this year’s prize to the JTL-Shop 5 VUE LOVE.
What's next with JTL-Shop 5?
Nevertheless, the development of JTL-Shop 5 is not a finished process. On the contrary! We have already fine-tuned the software this year with version 5.1. We are continuously refactoring and working hard on the store’s performance. And we will also be releasing a new version in 2022, in which we will give our NOVA template a fresh update and fulfill more of your feature requests.
You can already look forward to a PayPal plugin that is easy to set up and allows your customers to check out quickly and conveniently using “Smart Payment Buttons”. With these buttons, customers will also be able to select country-specific payment methods – a decisive step towards making your store even more attractive for foreign customers!
We are paving the way for even more convenience: Our new address management in the customer account will be a noticeable added value, especially in your B2B business. We also want to expand the interface to JTL-Wawi so that customers can initiate returns directly from the shop in future. And we recently started planning an automatic updater to simplify the regular update process for your store.
News about JTL-POS
There is already news to report about JTL-POS: Our cash register has recently been available in the Amazon app store (Amazon Developer) and is therefore also accessible for Amazon Fire tablets. And since version 1.0.5.0, JTL-POS has been able to capture user-defined bar code schemes from scales, deposit machines and magazines. We will successively expand the recording of the cash register.
As you know, you can create, sell and redeem vouchers with JTL-POS thanks to the voucher management system JTL-Vouchers – not only at the store counter, but also in the online store. We are currently working on integrating JTL-Vouchers directly with JTL-POS WebManager. We are also developing an inventory module for this, which you can use to maintain the data for several cash registers and stores centrally – independently of JTL-Wawi. You can then control all essential functions from one portal.
New year. New possibilities
In 2022, you can expect a whole range of new features that will increase the usability, functionality and range of applications of JTL-POS. These include the integration of the innovative payment provider Viva Wallet, which enables contactless payments without an EC terminal, as well as an optimized version of JTL-POS CustomerDisplay with improved display and extended options.
And soon JTL-POS will be saying: “Goodbye, Austria!” Because we are determined to make our POS system RKSV-compliant in the coming year in order to meet the fiscal requirements of the Austrian Cash Register Security Ordinance.
JTL-Plan&Produce and JTL-Workbench
In the JTL development workshop, the team has continued to work diligently on our new “production module” and will continue to make important adjustments in 2022. Especially the merchants among you who manufacture or refine their own products will be following the progress with excitement. With JTL-Plan&Produce, you will be able to map your production directly in JTL-Wawi, while the JTL-Workbench assistance system will guide your employees through the respective production process via a separate interface.
Down payment of pilot customers is growing steadily
The software is already being tested by pilot customers, who are providing us with valuable feedback for ongoing development. The interest is huge: since the launch of JTL-Wawi 1.6 Open Beta, we have been receiving almost daily inquiries from merchants who would like to test JTL-Plan&Produce. We interview each interested party about their processes and decide on a case-by-case basis whether productive use makes sense ad hoc or whether we should wait for certain milestones to be reached first.
Excerpts from our to-do list for 2022
Next on our agenda are production preparation and production with production orders. We are increasingly focusing on the production of items with BBDs, batches and serial numbers and will continue to work intensively on the topic of resource planning. We are also taking the production of variation combinations without predefined child items into the new year. We also want to push ahead with the integration of the visual code editor Blockly so that you can customize and automate your production processes even without special IT expertise.
Other topics that we will be tackling over the course of the year include imports and exports with JTL-DataTransfer, subset management and a REST API for remote control of the production table.
On the road to success together
As you can see, our roadmap for 2022 also aims to further perfect the functionality, performance and usability of our solutions. We benefit enormously from your valuable ideas and input, which play a key role in determining our course and ensuring that we stay on the right track with all our projects. We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your lively feedback again this year! Because roadmap or not – we can only reach our goal together. Good luck for the new year and stay healthy!
If you would also like to steer the path of our development in a certain direction, then get actively involved via the JTL Issue Tracker.
