If Ecommerce is a big part of what you do with your Affino site then this is a great release for you. It’s especially good if you’re using Affino for running multiple Zones, Stores, Campaigns and regions.

There are some great new ecommerce capabilities such as the Supplier Management, Product Drill Down Menu DE and Recently Viewed Products DE. Of all the updates in this release approximately 50 are directly ecommerce related and pretty much all the remainder are directly related to running better online stores.

The single most significant development is the Detail Skin which allows you to have a different skin when viewing details and listings. This is most significant for online stores where you can really tailor the page design to maximize the conversion rates.

Campaigns, Micro Blogs and Salesforce.com integration also get big updates in this release.

This is the eighth and final release of 2012. It’s a great ecommerce release. Almost every enhancement in this release improves the store management experience. The most significant enhancement is the ability to have Detail Skins on a Channel. This allows for specific Skins to display product details. These can be coupled with all the great new ecommerce Design Elements we’ve created over recent releases including the great new Recently Viewed Products DE.

It is now considerably easier to manage multiple stores on a single instance with improved Control Centre listings, searches and filters. We’ve improved product and order exports and imports and the Checkout now has new abilities to improve user profiling and gather address details.

We’ve introduced Supplier Management for the first time. This is especially useful for sites which are acting as hubs, reselling for 3rd parties. We’ve also upgraded a lot of the ecommerce management interfaces to make them more usable and effective.

It’s not just the core ecommerce capabilities that have been upgraded but a lot of associated elements for example Campaign Management which has had a major overhaul to handle high volumes of campaigns. Status updates now make for more effective promotions and the improved handling of Headings means that Affino’s SEO delivery has just gone up a notch.

All together there are around 100 improvements in this release so the experience will be improved for everyone no matter how you use Affino.

Upgrade Guidance

This release has a very significant update, the ability of have dedicated Detail Skins. The update should be smooth, however it is recommended that it is done during Comrz’s support hours should an issue arise which needs support.

It is essential that you run through the complete update process starting with the Affino Updater, followed by the System Update, Re-Initialise Site, Design Element Update and Skin Update; all of which are available on the Settings > Update screen. It means it is now possible to have up to 14 Skins per channel.

Key Enhancements

Detail Skin v1

This is the biggest structural change to come to Affino for some time. It will now be possible to have Main and Detail skins on each channel. The Main Skins will remain the default