All good things come in 5.3. To meet the expectations of the new version of JTL-Shop 5, we have some new features that you have been asking for the most, in the spirit of community-driven development. In this blog post, you can find out which new functions await you in the stable version of JTL-Shop 5.3.
Digital shop window - more personalization options for the product stream
The product stream is your store’s digital shop window and is therefore particularly important. For more design freedom, you can change the sorting of the displayed items and define how many products should be displayed depending on the screen resolution.
In the NOVA template, we have expanded the possible uses of the item stickers: Where you previously had a limited selection of available badges, you can now define colors and texts individually via the function attributes. As always, you can find step-by-step instructions in the JTL-Guide.
Improved performance
Although not directly visible to your customers, the following improvements to the shopping experience are nevertheless noticeable:
Browsing for items in your store causes the cache to fill up. With JTL-Shop 5.3, we have ensured that the memory consumption for page views is significantly lower and performance remains permanently high.
In addition, you can now set that, for example, only prioritized emails are sent out directly for actions such as order completions, while all others first end up in a queue and are sent in a separate process via cronjob. The advantage is a shorter loading time for the pages that trigger the sending of emails. You can find more information on this in the JTL-Guide.
Shipping class wizard
Depending on the product characteristics, different shipping methods are possible for the delivery of orders, which you can suggest to your customers in the checkout. For something bulky, such as a bed, it makes sense to choose a forwarding agent delivery, whereas for a book you can choose “Warenpost/Packet”. To ensure that your customers are only offered shipping methods that are suitable for the respective order at checkout, you can assign certain shipping classes to your items, such as “bulky goods”. Unsuitable shipping methods, such as “goods post” for a bed, are then no longer displayed as an option. Previously, all possible combinations of shipping classes for the individual shipping types had to be defined manually. With the shipping class wizard, this is largely automated, which saves you a lot of work. You can find the step-by-step instructions in the JTL-Guide.
Cookie selection and delivery times
We have also taken care of these two small but important adjustments for you: In the Consent Manager, it is now possible to select “technically necessary cookies”. In addition, the delivery time can now also be specified in weeks or months instead of just days.
Available soon: Returns, discounts and offline orders
Currently not yet implemented, but already in the starting blocks / available from the stable version of JTL-Wawi 1.9, is the option to log in returns via JTL-Shop. Your customers will be able to create a return in their account under the category “My returns” and select from the list of orders what should be returned. Only the items that are eligible for a return will then be available for selection. The status of the return will also be visible in the customer account.
For those of you who trade in the B2B sector, the new feature of customer-specific discounts per category will be particularly interesting. You can then display customized discounts in your store for individual business customers who order certain products in large quantities.
Another highlight that you can already look forward to is offline ordering. An order is received by email or telephone? With the new feature, the sales order is then transferred from JTL-Wawi to the shop account so that your customer can view all ordered items in their account.
Achieve your goals with new functions
If you are looking for additional features to enhance your JTL-Shop, you are guaranteed to find what you are looking for in the JTL-Extension Store. There we offer you a large selection of plugins and extensions, e.g. for your internationalization or new payment methods with PayPal Checkout. We wish you every success!
