We are very pleased to announce that v1.3.0 of the Open Mind Commerce system is now available for purchase! All license holders have now been contacted and you can upgrade your stores by downloading the upgrade files from your account area.

So what’s new?
Well there are two major changes to the system along with a host of other tweaks and fixes in this release but the two I will highlight here is the new MultiVars systems and changes to the Search Engine friendliness aspects…

Variant, options and add-ons galore…
The revamped variants system in v1.3.0 now gives store owners the ability to completely control how they want to sell products to shoppers. With unlimited variant groups, options and values along with customisable add-ons all on a per product basis, retailers will love the level of control and flexibility the eCommerce software will give them. Let’s take a real world example…

Joe Bloggs Shoe Emporium sells (unsurprisingly) shoes through its web site. Now for each make of shoe they sell three colours and ten sizes. The problem is though they don’t carry all the sizes for all the colours. Traditional eCommerce software cannot cater for this so this is where our MultiVars system takes care of things. All the retailer needs to do first is create two variant groups for colour and size and enter the various values for colours/sizes. He can then create individual products with their own weight, price and stock level and tell the system what the colour and size is for that product.

When the shopper arrives at his store, they will be able to choose the exact product size/colour they need plus will be told instantly if the product line is out of stock.

On top of this, Joe Bloggs can also set-up customisable addons for each product offering say a gift wrapping service which may be chargeable. When coupled with the product personalisation feature, Joe can not only sell exactly the products his customers want but also tailor his store for complete control…

We love search engines…
And so you should! The key to survival online these days is to make your store as search engine friendly as possible. Most eCommerce software packages already have limited SEF features, earlier versions of Open Mind Commerce provided a very stable platform for search engine bots and now, with the release of v1.3.0, we have taken this platform and turned it into one of the most flexible and feature rich search engine friendly store platforms available today!

We worked very closely with leading SEO companies and talked to them to find out what the biggest mistakes people make are when choosing an eCommerce software platform and what the vast majority of our competitors lack. We then took this feedback and re-worked the SEF features of Open Mind Commerce to take it to the next level…

Now with v1.3.0 you can:

• Set page titles, description and keyword meta tags
• Set the URL for internal links
• Set the link text for internal links
• Define the H1 tag content for each page
• Apply “nofollow” links to avoid duplicate content when selling products through cross-departments

All from the comfort of your admin area with no coding required! This applies to all the department pages, manufacturers, products, CMS categories and CMS articles, all controlled on a per-page basis! We can now honestly say that we are not aware of any eCommerce software platform on the market that can offer this level of control out of the box without some serious hard work and coding!

So what’s next?
Well work has already commenced on the next release of Open Mind Commerce, feature requests continue to pour into our tracker and we will be looking to release a new version every 4-6 weeks making Open Mind Commerce the best value eCommerce software platform on the market!

Thanks for reading and if you have any questions at all about the software then don’t hesitate to get in touch.